


Line of Succession

by lizzycromwell



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-09 20:32:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzycromwell/pseuds/lizzycromwell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft Holmes had hoped he could keep the existence of his son a secret for longer than six years, but life is dangerous for the family of the man who is the British government.  When Mycroft realizes his son’s life is threatened, he brings the youngest Holmes boy to London to raise as his heir apparent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Je Veux Vivre

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by an anon message to the tumblr ibelieveinmycroft.

Art was quiet most of the flight, pensive, but every half hour or so he would slip his pudgy little hand into mine and whisper, _Mama?_   Then he’d ask me a question about his father. 

“Do I look like him?” Art asked.

I pushed a curl of hair out of his eyes.  Art was my baby, _my_ son as much as his father’s, and I felt a stab of possessiveness as my hand brushed against his forehead.  He had my thick black hair, my skin—the color of cocoa powder, or cinnamon, as Terry once told me in a lovesick slur.  Perhaps there was something of his father in Art’s high forehead, _perhaps_ , but his dark eyes were mine.  I clung to these little things more and more lately, as I noticed an intensity in those eyes ( _my_ eyes) that hadn’t been there when he was just toddling around, crying when he stubbed his toe.  He was still my sweet little boy, and yet, and yet…

“We’ll know when you’re a little bigger,” I hedged.  “Some day you’re going to look back at old pictures of yourself and wonder how you could ever change so much.”  _I’m already noticing changes,_ is what I didn’t say.

Later, as the flight attendant tossed us two tiny bags of the saddest pretzels I’d ever seen, Art spoke again.

“Is my father a singer like you, Mama?”

I laughed.  “Certainly not!  He’s, well… he’s a very important person in the British government.  Not a singer.  But I’ve heard him play the piano, and he’s _almost_ as good as you, sweetheart.”

Art’s face, too serious for a six-year-old, brightened.  “Does he have a piano at his house?”

There had been a piano there seven years ago—the first and last time I’d been inside the grand London residence of the father of my child.  It was a beautiful house, tasteful and antiseptic, with fine pieces of art and historical artifacts on bookcases, or set into glass cases in the walls.  An intimidating house, not exactly the place a little boy could run around in.  But Art was not an ordinary child, and chances were, _I_ would be the more intimidated party.

But the piano—I remembered the piano distinctly, a gleaming instrument that he told me once belonged to Élie-Miriam Delaborde, illegitimate son of the once famous but now somewhat neglected 19th-century composer Charles-Valentin Alkan. 

It was appropriate—a bastard piano, for our little bastard boy.

“Mama?”

“Yes, there’s a piano,” I answered.  “Or at least, there used to be.  If it’s not there anymore we’ll get you a new one.”  Maybe, preferably, one with a less portentous history.

Suddenly, I felt sick.  What was I even doing?  Was I crazy?  I had to be crazy to uproot like this, move three thousand miles across an ocean and take my son to live with a virtual stranger just because this stranger—the whole sharing half of his DNA with my son thing didn’t make him less of a stranger—said we would be “imperiled” if we didn’t come to England immediately, where he could “ensure the safety of our progeny.”  Was _he_ crazy?  That’s the way a crazy person talked, wasn’t it?  Surely it was too cloak and dagger to be real. 

But on the other hand, Art’s father really was a very important person in the British government.  And that was a gross understatement.  If "Uncle Willam" were to be believed, he was the British government itself.

So then, what was worse: that Art’s father might be a crazy megalomaniac?  Or that, for some unfathomable reason, my son’s life was in danger?

I gripped the arm of my seat, white knuckled.  I didn’t want to believe it, but how could I doubt now, after what had happened to Terry?

Art patted my hand, looking worried again.  “It’s okay, Mama.  I don’t need a piano.  I can play in my head if I have to, see?”  Art ran his fingers along the edge of the tray table to demonstrate, and I knew that he really could hear every note in his head.  Every note, and the trill of the flute, and the deep bass of the cello.  He hummed a little, and I recognized the melody—it was “Aria for Beatrice,” the showpiece Art had written specifically to fit my vocal range, from his nearly-completed opera based on Dante’s _Divine Comedy_.

He was a prodigy, my little boy.

Mycroft Holmes’s little boy.

* * *

It was 2006, and I was performing at the British Library for a special gala celebrating the acquisition of a large collection of Elizabethan manuscripts.  Apparently a very old, very rich woman had died and in her will left her priceless historical collection to the library.  (Scholars, of course, were elated; her children and grandchildren… less so.  The documents weren’t strictly priceless.  Several million dollars was more like it.)

None of the manuscripts were Shakespeare (they were the plays and writings of Ben Johnson), but considering that the Elizabethan playwright being honored was a contemporary of Shakespeare, the event organizers thought it would be appropriate to have a musical performance with selections from famous operas based on the Bard’s works.

I thought it a little unfair to poor Ben Johnson, who was really rather more famous than Shakespeare in their day but now perpetually languished in his shadow.  My sympathies could only extend so far, however: one, because Ben Johnson was dead; and two, because I was the concert singer they’d chosen.

It was the first time that I had been specifically invited (me, myself alone, by name) to sing at an event like this, and I marveled at the program—gilt lettering on fine linen paper, with my name at the top of the sheet:

Béa Marchand

_Lyric Coloratura Soprano_

Performing selections from:

Charles Gounod’s _Roméo et Juliette_

Ambroise Thomas’s _Hamlet_

and

 _Das Liebesverbot_ , by Wilhelm Richard Wagner

The night passed like a blur, I was so happy.  I’d never _been_ so happy, and I thought to myself, as I stood before all these rich English dilettantes, _this is what my life is going to be now_.  I was on the up and up, and that night was a validation of my choice to leave my academic career for music.  I sang Juliet’s waltz from _Roméo et Juliette_ , the sparkling “Je veux vivre,” and that D6 was the clearest and purest I’d ever sung it, and I meant every word of the lyrics.

_Je veux vivre_

_Dans le rêve qui m'enivre_

_Ce jour encor!_

_I want to live_

_In the dream that exhilarates me_

_This day again!_

It’s an awfully ironic song, really, when you think about what happens to Juliet in the end.

After the performance, my accompanist Terry and I circulated through the crowd, champagne flutes in hand, accepting the congratulations of our audience.  _Beautifully done, what a vision, spectacular, a true prima donna!_ They were a little tipsy, but quite sincere.

A few hours of that, and then the night was winding down.  Terry was at the piano taking requests (I heard Elton John from across the room), and I took the opportunity to sneak out of the great hall where the reception was held and into the adjoining room where the manuscripts were on display. 

The room was dimly lit, the sole illumination coming from the glass case in which Ben Johnson’s yellowed manuscripts were entombed.  I walked slowly across the tiled floor, enjoying the still and the silence.  I gazed down at the old folios in the case.  The sight took me back to grad school, perusing boxes at the special collections library, parsing every sentence, straining my eyes to read that 17th-century handwriting.  It had been nice, for a while.  I’d thought I could do that forever.  I circled the case, remembering.  The click of my heels echoed in the empty room.

Or at least I thought it was empty.

“Béatrice Marchand.”  A woman’s voice startled me from my reverie.  I nearly jumped out of my skin.  I turned to face her.

She was a tall, thin brunette in an impeccable charcoal gray suit.  I didn’t think I’d seen her in the audience before—she would have stood out among the society women in their formal gowns—so I assumed she worked for the Library.  Maybe I wasn’t allowed so near the manuscripts.

“Oh! Umm, yes, I’m Béatrice,” I said hastily.  I’m sure I sounded nervous.  The performance high was wearing off, and I was coming down to my all too ordinary self: anxious, agreeable, easily awed by authority.  “Can I help you with something?  Or… am I not supposed to be in here?”

The woman smiled in a distracted way, glancing down at the odd-looking phone in her hand.

“Would you please come with me.”  It wasn’t a question.

I followed without question too.

The woman in the suit led me purposefully away from the reception, through a maze of corridors I wasn’t sure I could have reversed to find my way back.  She walked quickly, much too quickly for someone in heels as high as hers, and I found I was always a pace behind.  She never once glanced back at me—she was constantly typing into that phone of hers.  It looked like something out of Star Trek, so thin and sleek with a touchscreen.  A year later, Apple released the first iPhone, and I realized what I’d seen.

I suddenly realized that we were outside, standing in a parking lot.  “Excuse me?” I finally asked.  “Where are we going?”

“Most people would have asked that before now,” she replied, not looking at up.  Her tone was indifferent, but I felt like I’d been slapped.

A black town car pulled up.

“I’m going to text my friend, let him know where I am,” I said.  We’d been engaged for six months, but I still couldn’t bring myself to call Terry my _fiancé._   The word kept getting stuck in my throat; I couldn’t swallow it.

The woman shrugged.

_Terry, going to meet some big shot involved with the BL._

_If you don’t hear from me in 1 hour call me.  I might be getting murdered._

I was joking.  A little.

I realize how stupid it sounds: getting into a car with a strange woman, going to a mysterious undisclosed location, but 2006 was a strange year for me.  In May, I graduated from Cambridge with a PhD in Early Modern World Literature.  In June, I did the first reckless thing I’d ever done in my life: I turned down a tenure-track job at the University of York, and I began to sing full-time.

And miraculously, everything was working out.  I received an email from the events coordinator for the British Library inviting me to sing at this gala—for a sum that struck both Terry and me as extravagant.  The email said that a member of the Board of Directors had requested me specifically, having seen some of my performances (at lesser venues) on youtube.  Hooray for the Internet!  We bought a cake, and Terry rented a tuxedo, and I purchased the first floor-length gown I’d worn since my high school prom.

Sue me; I was twenty-eight years old.  Young people are stupid.  I was stupid.  But what little experience I had seemed to show me that I was destined for a charmed life.  I believed, like Juliet, that I could have _ce jour encor._ This day, this night, again and again and again.

So I got in the car.  But just to be safe, I texted Terry the license plate number.

* * * 

“Sir, this is Béatrice Marchand,” the woman with the iPhone said, as we stepped into the brilliantly illuminated study.  It was modern, minimalist, cold despite a fire burning in the grate.  The décor suited the man reading by the fire—he was dressed severely, in a navy blue suit with the faintest pinstripes, and his expression as he looked up at me was chilling.

“Dr. Marchand,” the man said with icy courtesy.  “How kind of you to join me.  Please, do sit down.  Would you like some tea?" 

“Thank you, but no,” I said, taking the only other seat in the room, across from him.  The fire began to warm my right side.  “I’m—I’m quite fine.  Thank you.”  I clasped my hands in my lap, looked up, waited.

“This is the part when you ask what you are doing here,” he said after a moment’s silence.  He spoke patiently, like a grade school drama teacher prompting a student with her cue. 

I glanced back at the doorway, where the woman in the suit had been standing just a moment before.  She was gone.  “I’m afraid I haven’t been told much about why I’m meeting with you,” I said, pretending I hadn’t just been instructed what to say.  “I don’t believe I saw you at the Library earlier this evening.”

“No, you did not,” he said, leaning back in his chair.  “Although I did see your performance, remotely.”  He gestured at a screen on the wall behind me.  I hadn’t noticed it before, but it looked like streaming video from the British Library.  I saw staff wheeling away the piano Terry had accompanied me on, taking down the bunting and clearing away the catering dishes. 

I turned back to the man to find him smiling in a thoroughly alarming way. 

 _Oh god, I really am getting murdered tonight,_ I thought. 

“You were quite good.”

 _He’s in his early forties, by the looks of it.  I could outrun him, maybe, but this dress makes it harder…_

“The Library was not entirely convinced that they should hire an unknown, virtually untrained young woman for such a high profile event, but I managed to persuade them that you would be up to the task, and I am most pleased that you proved me right.” 

“Oh!” I said, my escape plans interrupted.  “You’re the board member who recommended me?”

“A scholar for a scholarly evening,” he replied.  “It seemed appropriate, Dr. Marchand.”

I tensed in my chair.  This was the second time he’d called me _Doctor_ , and it only hit me then that I had not told him, nor the woman I took to be his assistant, nor any of the event organizers, that I had a PhD attached to my name.  It hadn’t been in the program either. 

All of a sudden, I was less frightened than angry.  I was being toyed with.  I wasn’t a child in a school play; I was a mouse running around in circles for the pleasure of a hungry cat.  And the indignity and, ultimately, pointless cruelty of that broke through my customary deference.  I _was_ Dr. Marchand.  I may have hated graduate school, but I’d been good at it and I’d worked for that degree.  I didn’t have anything to prove to anyone.

“I suppose this is the part when I ask how you know I have my doctorate,” I said drily.  “But I hope it’s also the part when you tell me who _you_ are, what you want, why you so _graciously_ had an unknown, untrained nobody sing at the British Library, and when the hell I can get back to my fiancé, who probably thinks I’ve been kidnapped by a psychopath who’s going to cut me open and, I don’t know, make a harp from my vocal cords or something!”  I took a breath.  “Is it that part yet?” 

The man smiled again, an almost feral smile.  “Very good,” he said.  “Very clever.  But you needn’t worry—I am not a psychopath, though I could introduce you to a few if you are so inclined.”  He paused, raised an eyebrow.  “No?  Well then, I shall begin _my_ monologue, if you don’t mind.”

I raised my chin.  “Not at all.”

“Excellent,” he said.  “My name is Mycroft Holmes, and I know far more than the fact that you have a doctorate from Cambridge.  I know that you wrote your dissertation on identity and self-fashioning in the genre of autobiography during the age of Atlantic revolutions.  I know that your full name is Béatrice Adelaide Marchand though you perform merely as Beá, that you were born in London but are in fact a direct descendant of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, on your mother’s side.

I know that your father was a professor of theology at Heythrop College until he died of a heart attack two years ago, at which point you realized that the only person who would be disappointed in you for leaving academia was gone, leaving you free to dash off the final chapters of your dissertation and after that pursue whatever career you truly wanted—which, as past months have made apparent, is opera.

“I know that your fiancé Terrence Martin is an accomplished pianist but an only passable composer, along with the fact that he is no more physiologically fecund than creatively, which is one of the reasons you find him slightly contemptible.  But I will nevertheless have you back to him before ten o’clock tonight, Dr. Marchand, I assure you, at which time you may if you so wish return to your lukewarm engagement.”

My face was burning, and the fire was nearly intolerable.  There were so many horrible things in that monologue that I couldn’t speak.  The Béatrice this Mycroft Holmes described was so callous and calculating.  Could I really discard my father’s memory like that?  Would I really dump Terry, given the chance?  And even if I could do all those things, who the _hell_ was he to say so?  I wanted to leave that second without saying another word.  And yet… and yet… I had to ask.

“Why do you say my engagement is lukewarm?”

“Well it’s quite obvious, isn’t it?” he asked rhetorically.  “You are wearing your ring now, but took it off during your performance.  Clearly, you are acting out in your singing a desire to be another person, with another life.  It is, of course, the same reason you abandoned a perfectly respectable if quite tedious career as a young professor for the more capricious world of the stage.”

“I thought _that_ was metaphorical patricide,” I retorted.

Mycroft Holmes spread his hands.  “I would hardly insult you with Freudian analysis, Dr. Marchand.”

I scoffed, and rose from my seat.  “Thank you for a bizarre evening, Mr. Holmes.  Please do not recommend me for any other organization you have a hand in.” 

“Dr. Marchand—Béatrice.  There’s no reason to rush out to save your pride.  I am not judging you.  Your ambition is the quality I most admire, in fact.  Please stay, and hear me out.” 

I laughed, incredulous.  “Oh wonderful, there’s more!” 

“You are a scholar, Béatrice.  Surely you retain some qualities of intellectual curiosity—more so than your former colleagues, I imagine, if you refused to resign yourself to academic imprisonment.”

“Was that a compliment?” I asked.

“Sit down, Béatrice,” Mycroft Holmes said again, this time an order instead of an invitation.  “As it turns out, I am involved in a great number of organizations, and I should hate to see someone with your natural talent locked out of opportunities for no better reason than words said in haste.” 

That was not a compliment.  That was clearly a threat.  _What a nice voice you have,_ is what I heard, _such a shame if anything were to happen to it…_

“Let me text Terry to let him know I’m alive,” I said with a sigh.  Then I sat down, and I listened to Mr. Holmes’s proposal.

* * *  

I started lying to Terry as soon as I got home.

“Terry!  Oh my god Terry you won’t believe this!” I exclaimed as I swung open the door to our apartment.  “Terry, wake up!  Wake up!”

It was ten o’clock sharp when I got back (as Mr. Holmes had promised), but Terry was an early to bed, early to rise sort of fellow.  He stumbled out of our bedroom when he heard my voice.

“What is it Beth?” he mumbled.  “I was asleep.”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” I said, guiding him to the kitchen table, where he collapsed into a chair.  “I’m going to make us some coffee—I know, I know, it can’t be helped.  I’ll never get to sleep if we don’t talk about this _now_.”

Terry was good-natured, and he loved me so much.  I felt a pang of guilt.  If I did this to him, there was no going back—I really would be as callous and manipulative as Mr. Holmes had implied.  But even in that moment of guilt, I knew I’d already decided.

“Terry,” I began, “I have amazing news.”

* * * 

“You want me to _what?_ ” I nearly shouted.  “This is… this is…”

“Highly irregular.”

“ _Insane,”_ I corrected him.  “This is insane.  And so much creepier than I expected—which is a hard thing to pull off, considering I thought you were going to murder me.”

Mycroft Holmes closed his eyes for the briefest moment, as though praying for patience.  I can only imagine how thickheaded he must have thought me.  Knowing what I do now, I’m amazed he had so much self-restraint.

“I’ve read your medical history.”

“Of course you have.”

“You are in perfect health, and you have no family history of any major diseases—no heart disease, hypertension, or diabetes, no mental illness, and no forms of cancer.”

“My father died of a heart attack at fifty,” I said.  “I thought you’d know that already.”

“Your father was morbidly obese,” he said.  “As you know I know.  And let us try to maintain civility, Béatrice.  There’s no need to be smart.”

“Fine,” I said.  “I have a clean bill of health.  If that’s all you want, there are literally millions of women in England who could give you a child.”

Mycroft Holmes nodded once.  “Yes, but the numbers decline when you are looking for perfect health and a genius IQ.”

“Are you breeding super-babies?” I asked.  He narrowed his eyes.  “No, no, I’m not being smart!” I protested.  “It’s a serious question.”  And it really was.  Everything that had happened to me that night had been so incredibly unlikely—I had basically been abducted by an extremely wealthy middle-aged man with access to private medical records and God knows what else, and he had just proposed that I undergo in vitro fertilization so I could give birth to his hypothetical child.  Why shouldn’t he be breeding super-babies?  It was no stranger than anything else I’d heard.

“Intelligence is a quirk of genetics,” Mycroft answered.  “My mother was a brilliant mathematician, whereas my father is a man of above-average intelligence who enjoys line dancing and Britain’s Got Talent.  Please do not ask me how that marriage endures to this day—frankly, I can give you no answer.  I inherited my mother’s intellectual aptitude, as did my brother to a lesser degree.  To the best of my ability, I intend to ensure that those qualities are passed on to the next generation.”

“So the mother of your imaginary child has to be as close in intelligence to you as you can manage,” I said.

“As close in intelligence as she can be,” Mycroft replied, “without exceeding a level that would mark her out as abnormal in the society of other people, yes.”

“Not too smart to draw attention.”

“Precisely.”

I laughed.  At this point, I was finding the situation so absurd that I had forgotten to be afraid.

“I am prepared to pay you in excess of one hundred thousand pounds a year to bring my child to term and raise him or her until the age of eighteen, at which time I will expect you to have informed him or her of his or her true parentage and bring him or her back to London to live with me.”

“Bring him _back_ to London…” I trailed off.  Slow, slow.  I was so slow.  “You’ll want us to move away?”

“To the United States,” Mycroft said.  “I can arrange for you to have a job with an opera company in any major city of the country.  You’re talented, I have no doubt you’ll overcome the sting of nepotism soon enough.  The one hundred thousand pounds would not, of course, include the salary from your regular employment.”

“No, that would be absurd,” I said, but the comment was a little less barbed, my tone less poisonous.

“You’re considering it,” Mycroft said, looking quite pleased with himself.

I frowned.  “You’re surprised, then?  You’re capable of being surprised?”

“Not at all,” he said, and I realized that smug Mycroft Holmes was almost worse than sinister, threatening Mycroft Holmes.  “I wouldn’t have asked you if I were not entirely sure that you would be agreeable.  I simply did not expect you to agree so quickly.”

“You can promise me a job?” I pressed.  It was my greatest source of anxiety, the though that my charmed life would wear off and _following my dreams_ would leave me in the gutter after all.

“Anywhere you’d like.  The Metropolitan Opera in New York seems like a good place to start.  Or perhaps you’d like the California climate better.  Los Angeles, San Francisco.  Name the place.”

“I’d rather know why you feel the need to go to such lengths to keep this a secret,” I said.  “What’s the point of having a child if you don’t want to see him for two decades?”

Mycroft looked me straight in the eyes.  “You misunderstand me entirely, Dr. Marchand.  I have a legacy to pass on, and it is my duty to see that task completed before I die.  In a perfect world, I would raise the child myself, but I am in a position that holds certain… _risks_ for the people close to me.  It is more important to limit my child’s exposure to danger than to indulge in a fantasy of sentimental fatherhood that could bring the child to harm.”

He was sincere, and I was moved.  “I’m sorry,” I finally said.  “I’m sure you would be a… a good father, if the circumstances were different.”

“Are we agreed, then?”

I paused.  The mood was far too heavy for me, and I was afraid I had insulted the father of my future child.  “You know,” I said, “most men at least _tell_ a girl she’s pretty before asking her to have their secret super-genius baby.”

Mycroft Holmes smiled.  “Considering facial symmetry and other common markers of female attractiveness, yes, you are quite lovely, Béatrice,” he said slyly.  “Regrettably, you’re not my type.”

“That’s all right.”  I looked away, hiding a grin.  “You’re far too well-dressed for me. Tailored suits and waistcoats make me incredibly nervous.  Terry and I go around in threadbare sweatpants all the day long, and not just because we’re strapped for cash.”

“I believe you may have had too much champagne at the reception, Béa Marchand.”  He sounded almost affectionate.

“I didn’t have nearly enough,” I replied.

* * *

The most surprising thing was how _easy_ all of it was.  Convincing Terry that I’d received a windfall from the estate some mysterious distant relative (I know it sounds like a Hollywood cliché, I told him, but if something’s a cliché it means it has to have happened to someone); getting him to move with me to New York (there would be more opportunities for me in the U.S., I said, I could just feel it); telling him I wanted to marry and start a family (after months of stalling about setting a wedding date); insisting on _in vitro_ right away (we could afford it after all, and we knew about Terry’s fertility problems).  He swallowed my lies, and he loved the taste.

In the end, Terry believed I wanted to start a family with him because it’s what he’d always wanted to believe.

The baby was healthy, and beautiful.  _Mixed-race kids are always the cutest_ , our new New York friends told us with well-meaning excitement.  And no one ever doubted that he was mine and Terry’s.  Why should they have?

Six months after I gave birth to Arthur Marchand Martin, I auditioned at the Metropolitan Opera and was offered a minor role in _The Magic Flute_.

“Your first audition, Beth!” Terry’d exclaimed, lifting me in the air and spinning me around with ease despite the fifteen extra pounds of baby weight I couldn’t seem to lose.  “Sometimes I feel like God’s pulling strings for us.”

Not God, I told him.  Not quite.

Terry agreed to be a full-time stay-at-home dad.  He found a playgroup for Arthur, became a great favorite with the other moms.  I don’t think he ever cheated on me.  If he had, it hardly matters now.

I did love Terry, you know, in my way.  He was such a good father to Art, so kind and patient, the kind of model every son needs.  And when I lay awake at night worrying about Art, worrying that he was too different, that the other kids would bully him, that his uniqueness would distance him from us, that he would stop being the sweet little boy who adored his mother and father ( _not his father,_ a voice in the back of my head would call out, mercilessly), Terry would wrap his arms around me and assure me that everything would be all right.  _You should have seen Art at the park today_ , he would tell me.  _He’s such a natural leader with the other kids.  They all love him.  He showed them all how to put turrets on their sandcastles this afternoon, can you believe it?  He’s a good kid.  He gets on well with everyone._

Even so, Art frightened me a little as he grew older.  I know that’s a terrible thing for a mother to say, but he did.  It was quickly apparent that Mycroft Holmes’s genetic gamble had paid off.  Art was smart, eerily smart, reading Sophocles in the original Greek at four years old sort of smart.  And occasionally I got the sense that he was hiding things from us.  Little hints, like the time I was passing by his bedroom as Terry tucked him into bed.  Art smiled when he hugged Terry, but as soon as Terry turned his back his smile immediately dropped.  When he saw me watching him, Art didn’t even blink.

It sent shivers down my spine.

These were the kind of things I couldn’t talk about with Terry.

Then in 2013, Terry and Art got hit by a car while walking home from Central Park one afternoon.  According to eyewitnesses, Terry pushed Art out of the street just in time to save him from impact.  Terry died hours later in the hospital, from massive internal bleeding.  Art had escaped with a sprained ankle and some bruises. 

It was a freak accident, I told myself.  It was a distracted driver.  It was a young man, like the newspapers said, texting while driving.  I convinced myself I believed it.

The next day I got a phone call from a blocked number and the voice on the other end of the line—a man’s voice I recognized immediately—said it wasn’t an accident.  I tried to argue, but really it was futile.  And without Terry, I was out of my depth.  I had loved him, in my way.  I would miss him too.

I found Arthur watching me from the doorway to my bedroom after I hung up the phone.  He nearly gave me a heart attack when he asked:

“Was that my real father?”

We packed our things and flew to London.  I told my friends and my co-workers that I wanted Art to be near family during this difficult time.

It wasn’t all a lie.

 


	2. Uncle William

The house was empty when Art and I arrived.  The driver who had picked us up from the airport placed our two small bags—we had been in such a rush that we hadn’t even checked luggage—in the foyer, tipped his hat to us, and left without another word.  Maybe he had been instructed not to talk to us.  I couldn’t get as much as a _hello_ out of him the whole ride here.

I wanted to throw up from the anxiety.  Art was bouncing on his toes.

“Can I go explore, Mama?” he asked excitedly.

“How about we stick together for now,” I suggested, taking his hand in mine.  For a second, it felt like he meant to pull away, but at the last moment Art squeezed my fingers.  Forbearance, for his mother.

The décor was much the same as the last time I’d been there, at least as far as I could remember.  I recognized this painting or that, this vase, that suit of armor on the wall.  Art marveled at everything—it was nothing like our apartment in New York, which had been cozy and warm.

“The piano, Mama!” Art said as we passed through a large sitting room.  “Can I play?”

I nodded, and Art raced off.  As long as I could hear music in the other room, I would know he was okay.

The next room was the kitchen, granite counters and chrome fixtures, with a large island for preparing food in the center of the space.  The refrigerator made a low hum to my left, a very appealing hum, and as I was just opening the door I felt something buzz in my pocket.

My new phone, sent to me by overnight mail after the car accident, along with a note that I was to destroy all our old cell phones.  In my fear I had done it immediately, only realizing after that I had just lost hundreds of pictures of our family.  Our old family.

That was the only time I’d cried since the accident.  It was a very 21st-century reason to cry, I think.

But now I had a text message, and I knew I could trust it because Mycroft was the only person who had this number.

_Béatrice, I hope your flight was uneventful and you and Arthur made it here safely.  If you are not too tired when you arrive, please text me at this number and I will send you a location we can meet.  MH_

_We’re here,_ I texted back, and the response was almost instantaneous:

_221b Baker St._

I sighed.  Once more into the breach.  “Arthur!” I called.  The music from the adjacent room abruptly stopped.  “Get your coat, we’re going to see your father.”

* * * 

When Art was four years old we put him in preschool, one of those fancy Manhattan preschools you have to compete to get into.  But for this, I didn’t even need to call on any mysterious friends to pull strings for us—my name alone was good enough to get us in the door.

“Ms. Marchand— _Doctor_ Marchand, I mean—it is _such_ a pleasure!  My husband saw you in _Fidelio_ and said you were just magnificent…”  And so on like that.  According to the Arts and Culture reviewers, I was actually good.  It really _was_ possible to forget about the nepotism after a while, just like I’d been promised.

So Art enrolled in preschool.

He was, as Terry had always said about Art in their play groups, universally adored by the other children.  But he confounded the teachers.

_Arthur refused to join his classmates for Vowel Time after lunch today.  Did you know your son could already read?_

Actually, we hadn’t, though I wasn’t surprised Art would try to avoid an activity called “Vowel Time.”

“Art, sweetie,” I asked him that night, “why didn’t you tell your daddy and I that you can read?  We’re so proud of you!”

Art had looked so confused.  “I thought you would be mad.”

“Why would you think that, son?” Terry asked, stroking Art’s curly hair.  Art had turned away from Terry to look directly at me.

“Don’t you want me to be normal?”

“We want you to be exactly who you are, and we’ll love you no matter what,” I promised, though I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight.  “Is there anything else you want to tell us?”

Art had smiled then, beatifically, like we’d just lifted a great weight from off his shoulders.  “I can read English and French and Greek,” he said proudly.  “Can I have a computer for Christmas so I don’t have to borrow Daddy’s all the time?”

It was only October, but we bought him a laptop anyway.

I asked Art once if he wanted to stop going to school with the other children, but he was adamant.

“Uncle William says it’s important to get along with other people.  He said that was his mistake.  School is good practice.”

I remember feeling the blood drain from my face.  I could see it in my head so clearly—some pervert in a chat room talking to my son, who was so smart but still in preschool for God’s sake!  _Uncle William?_   Did he know where Art went to school?  Would he find him there, and kidnap him, and… and… Every horrible possibility flew through my head in that moment.

But I tried to play it cool, rather unsuccessfully.  “Who… who’s Uncle William, sweetie?” I asked.  “Is he an imaginary friend?”  I could only hope.

“Nope, he’s in England,” Art replied, not noticing, or pretending not to notice, how distressed I was.  “He’s a detective.  He solves crimes.  He’s my father’s little brother.”

“Art, baby, your daddy doesn’t have any brothers.  He’s an only child like me, and like you.”

Art wrinkled his nose.  “No not _Terry_ ,” he said.  “My _real_ father.  He’s my real father’s brother, and he lives in England.  He called on the house phone yesterday when you were at the store and Terry was napping.”

“Did he… did he leave a number to call him back on?” I asked, trying to ignore the blood pounding in my ears, my racing heartbeat.

“Nope.”

“No?”

“He just wanted to say hi.  He was hoping you’d be home, but he said he’d call back another time.”

I could have dropped dead right then, in the middle of the kitchen, of a heart attack.  Maybe it _was_ in the family.  Maybe I was going out the way my father went out.  I’d always thought it was so silly, in movies, how a character will say “You might want to sit down for this” when they’re about to give someone shocking news.  _What good will that do?_ I’d think to myself, chewing my popcorn, oblivious to what it meant to truly, truly be shocked.  Not even Mycroft Holmes’s proposal all those years ago had been so shocking—it was too ridiculous to frighten me, and I was too young to think anything bad could ever happen.  But I had a son now, and even if he did make me a little nervous from time to time, he was my baby boy and I was supposed to protect him.

I needed to sit down.

So “Uncle William” wasn’t a pervert.  Okay.  That left two other options that were, in their own way, equally worrisome:

1\. He was one of the “enemies” Mycroft had spoken of back in 2006, posing as Mycroft’s brother to lower our guard before he… did whatever it is enemies of important people do.

2\. He really _was_ Art’s biological uncle (had Mycroft said he had a brother?  I couldn’t recall, but it seemed familiar).  Even that, however, didn’t assuage my fears because nobody, _nobody_ , was supposed to know who Art was except me, and Mycroft Holmes, and maybe the imposing brunette who had found me at the British Library that night.  Not Terry, and certainly not Art himself.  Mycroft had told me, very clearly, that secrecy was the most important thing.  I didn’t even post family pictures on Facebook, for the sake of secrecy, even when my mother berated me for “hiding away her only grandchild.”  Because that was exactly the point, wasn’t it.

Well whatever the case, I knew what to do.  I had a phone number that I was only supposed to call in an emergency.  A _real_ emergency.  I hadn’t even called it when Art broke his arm on a slip-n-slide the summer before.

“Yes.”  The voice on the end of the line could have been anyone, but it wasn’t, and I knew that.

“Somebody called the house last night and Art answered.  Someone calling himself ‘Uncle William,’ and I guess he gave him… I don’t know, life advice?  He may also have told Art that he’s not Terry’s son.”

“I imagine Arthur figured that part out himself.”

“Well, should I be worried?”

“No, I’ll take care of it.”

“It really _is_ your brother, then?”

“I must insist that you not pursue this line of questioning.  If anyone attempts to contact you again, let me know.  It really has been pleasure hearing from you, Béatrice, though I do hope we won’t talk again for quite some time.”

I’d opened my mouth to respond, but the line was dead.

* * * 

Art was practically bouncing up and down in the back of the cab; I’d never seen him smile so brightly.  The cabbie clearly thought Art was adorable, with his beaming smile and missing front tooth.  He winked at Art in the rearview mirror.

“221b Baker Street,” I said.  It wasn’t Art’s fault—I know he couldn’t help it, having known Terry wasn’t his father for at least two years and keeping all his questions to himself—but I couldn’t match my son’s excitement.  This day was coming twelve years too soon.  I would never have to break Terry’s heart with the truth now, but I wasn’t sure the price was worth it.  I ran my fingers over my wedding band.  I was a thirty-five-year-old widow.

“221b Baker Street,” the cabbie said.  He turned to look at Art. “You have a fun day, kid, all right?" 

But Art was already out of the vehicle, racing up the steps to the door, where a large metal knocker hung a little askew.  I straightened it, out of habit, and knocked.

A petite middle-aged woman (perhaps a little more than middle-aged) opened the door.  She had an apron on, and I spotted some flour in her short hair.  She brightened when she caught sight of Art bouncing on the doorstep.  He seemed to have that effect on people.

“Well hello there!” she said to my son.  “And who are you here to see?”

“Mr. Holmes,” I answered.  The woman didn’t smile when she looked up at me.  I knew I could be a formidable woman when I chose—years in the theater had given me a stage presence I had occasionally used to intimidate used car salesmen and grammar school principals.  And these days, I couldn’t be the diffident grad student even if I wanted.

“He should be expecting us,” I said, taking Art’s hand and stepping past the woman in the doorway.

“Well then,” she said with a bit of a huff.  “He’s right up the stairs.”

“Thank you,” I said, not particularly warmly, and we ascended the flight of stairs.  There was another door to knock on, and this time Art did the honors.

“Maybe, sweetie, maybe you should try to be a little less… ebullient,” I said with a bit of hesitation.  I didn’t want to squash his enthusiasm, but something told me that Mycroft Holmes wouldn’t be accustomed to the boundless energy of a six-year-old boy.  Better to be safe.

“Okay, Mama,” Art said, and I saw his shoulders relax and his face turn grave.  _Is this the act,_ I wondered, _or was the excitement a performance all along?_   I didn’t have much time to think about it, because I heard a man’s voice shout from inside.

“Come in!  The door’s unlocked!”

We stepped into the apartment, and I immediately felt that something was wrong.  The furnishings and decorations were absolutely _nothing_ like the house we had just left.  It seemed impossible that this place, with its oxblood-colored carpet and cluttered bookshelves and baroque wallpaper, could also belong to Mycroft Holmes.  There was a bull’s head on the wall, and a painting of a skull, for God’s sake!  I gripped Art’s hand tighter. 

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Martin!  Well, the former Mrs. Martin.” A man emerged from the kitchen holding a teacup.  “And little Arthur.  It is a rare day, to meet my only nephew.  Take a seat.  Let’s catch up.”

I was ready to run.  This was _not_ Mycroft Holmes.  But when I looked at him more closely, I nearly gasped.  The resemblance was unmistakable.  This man was tall, white, and blue-eyed, but he had the same dark curly hair as Art (hair I’d always thought he got from me), and his eyes were deep set like my son’s, with the high forehead he shared with Mycroft.  All the features I thought made Art mine…

I’d been as deluded as Terry.

The man smiled, and it was the same tense, somewhat forced smile I head learned to recognize in Art when he looked at my late husband.  I was seeing Art in thirty years.

“You’re Uncle William,” I said.

“Somewhat,” he replied.

* * * 

A month went by with no word from Mycroft or the mysterious caller, to my immense relief.  I told Art that he was to tell me right away if anyone else called talking about his “real father,” _anyone_ ,and that he could never talk to Terry about this either.

“Terry _is_ your daddy, Art,” I said, sitting him down at the kitchen table with a bowl of ice cream.  He loved ice cream, and I was not above bribery.  “He’s your dad in all the ways that really count.  He was there when you were born.  He was the first person who ever held you.  Your name is Arthur Marchand Martin, and when you grow up you’ll be Mr. Martin, or Dr. Martin, or Reverend Martin, or whatever you want to be, but you will always be a Martin because Terry and I will have raised you together.”

Art stirred his ice cream with a spoon, making it smooth, swirling the chocolate syrup into a spiral.

“Does Daddy know?” he asked.

I sighed.  “No, and he can’t know, not ever.”  _I am an actress,_ I told myself, _I can lie to a four year old._   “You see, some men have a very hard time making babies…”

“Because they don’t have enough sperm,” Art said, startling me.  He was four years old.  A four year old with a laptop and an Internet connection, but why in the world would he be looking up information on infertility if he didn’t already suspect something?

 _You are not afraid of your son,_ I admonished myself.  _You are not afraid of your baby boy, and you can lie to him._

“That’s right,” I said.  “That’s why I had to get a sperm donor, someone who volunteered to help couples like me and Terry have children.  I don’t know who that person was—it was completely anonymous.  That’s why it makes me so nervous to have you talking to this Uncle William on the phone.  He clearly found out who the sperm donor was, and who we are, and we don’t know what he wants.  We don’t talk to strangers on the phone, and we don’t email them, or interact with them in any other way.  Do you understand?”

“Stranger Danger,” Art said.  “That’s what Miss Meyers taught us in school last week.”

“Exactly.  Stranger danger.  So no more talking to Uncle William, okay?”

“But what if he calls again?”

“He won’t.”

“But what if he _does_?”

“Then you hang up immediately and tell me _that very minute_ what happened.”

“What if you’re not home?”

“Then you call me on my cell phone and leave a message, or you text me.  But you have to do it right away.”

“If you don’t know who he is…” Art’s voice was sly.  “How do you know he won’t call us back?”

“Because I’m an important person, Art,” I lied.  “I’m in the newspaper sometimes, remember?  I have friends who can keep us safe.”

Art nodded, and he ate his ice cream.  I could tell he was unconvinced, but that was the best I was going to get, and I had to accept it.

I was curious about “Uncle William,” though.  My brief conversation with Mycroft had convinced me that it really was his brother who’d called, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to Google _William Holmes_ and see what came up.

 _He’s a detective.  He solves crimes,_ Art had said.

 _I must insist that you not pursue this line of questioning_ , Mycroft ordered.

His name probably wasn’t even William anyway, I told myself.  It would be pointless.  _Don’t tickle a sleeping dragon,_ I thought.  I’d been reading Harry Potter to Art before he went to bed—not because he found it interesting, but because that’s what his friends’ parents’ did, and he was determined to keep up a semblance of normalcy.

I didn’t Google William Holmes, but _he_ found _me_ , and about three months after that first phone call I received an email:

_Dear Mrs. Martin,_

_It’s a shame we couldn’t chat after all, but you know Mycroft, incredibly controlling.  Arthur sounds like a precocious child; you should know Mycroft’s very proud of him.  He has a copy of the self-portrait Arthur sketched for class the other day secreted away in his desk drawer.  How he got it, I have no idea, but then you know, he has connections.  Between you and me, my dear brother is the British government incarnate.  He hates when I say that, of course, and it’s not really a compliment, but it is the duty of younger siblings to irritate, is it not?  Mycroft jumped down my throat about calling your house.  Apologies.  If you tell him about this email I fear there might not be an Uncle William anymore, but I felt compelled to write.  Your son is my blood, after all, and I disagree with my brother’s need-to-know policy.  You may not be so well hidden as you think, and I would be remiss not to warn you to be careful.  Be very careful._

And that was it.

I decided not to call Mycroft.  _What could he even do?_ I thought.  Moved us ever farther away?  I don’t think even Terry would have gone along with that, and I didn’t want it either.

I regret that decision now.

* * *

“Tea?” Uncle William asked.

“No,” I said.  “We won’t be staying.  And perhaps I’ve been in America too long, but I can’t quite accustom myself to being plied with tea every time something unpleasant is about to happen.”

“Unpleasant?” he asked.  “I apologize for deceiving you, but this is a family reunion!  We should celebrate.  Mrs. Hudson!  _Mrs. Hudson!_ ” he shouted out the door.

“I’m right here Sherlock, and I must remind you, I am _not_ your housekeeper.”  It was the woman in the apron, holding a beautiful golden Bundt cake on a floral tray.

“Thank you,” he said curtly, taking the tray from her hands.  “You can go now.”

“Thank you, ma’am!” Art called after the woman.  He looked up at me and whispered, “Uncle William was being rude.”

“You’re very right,” I replied.  “Though I think it’s Uncle Sherlock now.”

Sherlock Holmes looked up sharply; he had been smelling the cake.  “Rude?  I’m throwing you a homecoming party.  See?  I made you a cake.”

“Thank you, Uncle Sherlock,” Art said.  I could tell he was delighted with the turn of events.

“Indeed,” I echoed.  “We’re leaving now.”

“Let’s not be hasty,” Sherlock said, and I felt like I was trapped in a moment of _déjà vu._   “Mycroft will be here any minute.  He’ll be furious, I imagine, but I could hardly miss the opportunity to be present when father and son meet each other for the first time.”

Sherlock looked at Art thoughtfully, then back at me.  “I suspect Mycroft believed his son would be safer if he looked nothing like him, superficially, but the family resemblance is marked.  My little nephew.  Mummy and Daddy would be so pleased if they knew.”

“Did you invite them too?” I asked, not bothering to hide my sarcasm.

“Hardly,” Sherlock responded, nonchalant.  “I should not wish to make my brother apoplectic.”

“No, of course not,” I scoffed.

“Will you stay, then?”

“As if I have a choice.”

I led Art to a leather sofa, and we sat down.  Sherlock took the cake to the kitchen and began to cut slices for us, but before he could pull out some forks the door slammed open and Mycroft Holmes stepped in.

He was furious, as expected, though his anger manifested as frigid calm.  It was like a blizzard had just blown into the room.  He had an umbrella gripped in his left hand, though the sun was shining outside; no doubt he wanted to skewer his brother.

“Sherlock!” he snapped.  “You are completely mad and what you’ve done today—”

For some reason, after everything that had happened, the idea that Art’s first memory of his father should be Mycroft berating his little brother struck me as too horrible to bear.  I intercepted.

“Mycroft,” I said, standing.  He turned sharply.

“Béatrice,” he said.  “You look different.”

“I’m fatter and older, you mean, but that’s all right.  I’m a professional opera singer now, remember?”  I was almost manic in my forced cheer.  “Compared to the other sopranos, I’m positively svelte.  And besides, you’re fatter and older too.”

I tried to smile.  I was joking, of course I was joking.  If I didn’t joke this was going to turn into a Holmes family shouting match and that was not something Art needed right now.  Frankly, I didn’t need it either.

Mycroft smiled very, very slightly, and his gaze drifted to Art, who had stood up with me and was now perfectly still by my side.  I think he was frightened.  I had never seen Art frightened.

“I’m Arthur Martin,” he said with a bit of a tremble in his voice, extending his hand to shake.

“You are certainly not,” Mycroft replied crisply.  “Your name is Arthur Holmes.”


	3. Surprise Party

 

I could have slapped him.  I wanted to, so badly, and in my split-second fantasy I even received a round of applause from Uncle Sherlock.  But I settled for a verbal retort instead.

“You don’t get to rename my son, Mycroft,” I said.  “My husband, the only father Art has ever known, is hardly buried.  You don’t get to erase him from history.  You owe him that much.”

My voice was level, and I was unreasonably proud of myself for matching Mycroft’s icy calm.  He met my eyes, and I didn’t blink.

“You are different,” he said again, sounding the slightest bit surprised.  “But then, seven years is quite a long while.”  Mycroft bent slightly to address Art.  “You have my sincerest regrets for the death of Mr. Martin, Arthur.”  He looked back up at me.  “Both of you.”

I couldn’t bring myself to respond.

“Well,” Sherlock interposed, “That was remarkably uncomfortable.  But I am glad we got this little scene out of the way before the rest of the guests arrive.”

Mycroft rounded on his brother.  “ _What. Could. You. Possibly. Mean. By. That.”_ Every word was staccato, forced through clenched teeth and perfectly enunciated.  Mycroft’s grip tightened on his umbrella.

There was a knock at the door.

“Like clockwork!” Sherlock exclaimed.  “Arthur, I want to introduce you to your good old Uncle John and Aunt Mary.”

He swung open the door to reveal a friendly-looking man and a _very_ pregnant blonde woman holding balloons and a gift bag.

“Happy Birthday, Mrs. Hudson!” the couple shouted in unison.  Then they noticed our stony faces, and their smiles dropped.

“Umm… Sherlock?” the man asked.  “What exactly… and Mycroft… Why isn’t Mrs. Hudson here?”

“Because it isn’t her birthday, of course,” Sherlock said, ushering the couple into the apartment and shutting the door behind them.  “Or perhaps it is, but either way it does seem unlikely that I would organize a surprise party for her, don’t you think?  Much too considerate for me.”

The woman made a face that said this was as logical an explanation as any, and set the gift bag down on the carpet.  The man winced and rubbed his forehead.

“Arthur,” Sherlock said, gesturing to the new arrivals.  “This is my closest friend, Dr. John Watson, and his wife Mary, who is, as you can see, very close to bursting.”

“How kind, Sherlock,” Mary said, holding her stomach.  "Ooh, I'm starving."

Just then the woman in the apron--Mrs. Hudson apparently--appeared in the doorway again, bearing a tray of sandwiches (fortuitously for Mary, who took one immediately).  "I thought I heard someone calling me," Mrs. Hudson said.  "I just finished preparing lunch so I thought I'd bring it up.  Oh!  You're already here, Mycroft.  Happy Birthday, dear!"

Mycroft visibly winced at being called  _dear_.  "Mrs. Hudson, there has clearly been a series of misunderstandings here.  First, it is  _not_ my birthday.  Second, whatever it  _is_ does not require your presence."

"Well that's not very polite," Mrs. Hudson said with a sniff.  "I was only being hospitable.  I hardly even know you and every time show up you're in some sort of a temper.  Really, now."

"Mrs. Hudson," Mycroft said, "kindly  _shut up_ and  _get out._ "

" _Mycroft!_ " shouted Sherlock, John, and Mary (with her mouth full) in unison as Mrs. Hudson scuttled off with another  _Well really, now!,_ though not before Mary could take the sandwich tray from her hands.

Mycroft looked entirely unabashed, and commenced glaring at Sherlock.  Mary tried to fill the incredibly hostile silence, offering me a sandwich and smiling at Arthur.

“I don’t think we’ve met," she said to me.  "Is this your little boy?”

“I’m Arthur,” Art said, looking first to me then to Mycroft for guidance.  The adults, however, were too distracted to be much help.  Mycroft’s glare was fixed on his brother, and I was feeling a little queasy.  “I’m… umm… I’m visiting from New York,” Art finished.

“Arthur is my dear brother’s son,” Sherlock interjected cheerfully.  “Oh don’t look at me like that, Mycroft.  They’re family.  They were always going to know.”

The room fell silent again.

“Well… you’re quite handsome,” Mary said to Arthur, a valiant effort to break the suffocating tension.  “Don’t you think so, John?”

“Sherlock what is happening here?” John asked in a low voice, ignoring his wife.

“Nothing is happening, Dr. Watson,” Mycroft said.  “In fact, we were just leaving, though it is a pleasure as always to see you and Mrs. Watson looking so well.”  His clipped tone made it quite clear that he was not at all pleased.  “I’m afraid I do not have much time to socialize today.  We will speak later, brother mine _,_ you can be sure of that.  Now Béatrice, shall we go?”  Mycroft looked at me meaningfully and, to my surprise, took Art’s hand.  I nodded.  There were things I needed to say to Mycroft Holmes that I didn’t want to say in front of anyone else, least of all my son.

We were making our escape, Mycroft’s death grip on his umbrella handle making everyone else in the room think twice about stopping us.  But then I passed Mary, and got another whiff of the sandwiches.  I clapped my hand to my mouth, knowing I was seconds away from vomiting all over Mycroft’s fine woolen suit.  And that would hardly do.

“Where—where’s the bathroom?” I asked.  In perfect unison, Sherlock, John, and Mary pointed to a door down the hall.  Mycroft sighed audibly, his exit delayed again, but I had neither desire nor ability to pity him his uncomfortable family reunion.  Nor did I have time to fully process the protective way he held his arm around Art’s tense shoulders.

I slammed the bathroom door shut, turned the lock, and fell to my knees before the porcelain throne.  And then, well, you know.

I was too drained of energy (and fluids) to pay any attention to what was happening in the room outside during my gastrointestinal travails.  I thought I heard shouting at one point, but I couldn’t tell who it was or what about.  Then, five or fifteen or fifty minutes later, Mary knocked on the bathroom door. 

“Beatrice?” she asked.  “Beatrice are you all right in there?  The boys are being civil again, it’s safe to come out.”

I staggered to my feet and flushed the toilet.

“I’m sorry,” I said, opening the door.  “I didn’t mean to run out like that—it’s just, the nausea was overwhelming.  I’ve been feeling queasy off and on since the accident.  It’s the stress.  It’s… everything.  I’m so sorry, Mrs. Watson, please don’t mind me.  I just need a second to calm down…”

“Shh, shh, don’t apologize,” Mary said, taking my arm.  She shut the toilet lid and patted my shoulder as I sat down.  “You’ve been through a traumatic experience.  You lost your husband, and almost your son, and now you’re surrounded by crazy people.”

I looked up and marveled at how kindly she was smiling at me.  I was amazed.  “Mrs. Watson—”

“Please, please call me Mary.”

“Thank you so much, Mary,” I said.  “But I should really get back out there, I don’t want to leave Art alone—”

“Art will be fine,” Mary said.  “Even amongst the likes of us.  You need to take a moment, and… I think _we_ need to talk about something.”

I don’t know exactly what it was that put the thought into my head.  Something in her tone, though her voice remained calm and perfectly kind.  Or the way her hand inched closer to her stomach when she said _talk about something_.  But I suddenly knew what Mary Watson was thinking.

And it was impossible.  _Literally,_ it could not be possible.

“It’s the stress,” I said.

“You’re sure it wasn’t the smell of tuna and mayonnaise?”

“It’s two in the afternoon,” I insisted.  “Morning sickness doesn’t kick in at two in the afternoon.  That’s why… that’s why it’s morning sickness!”

“You’re jetlagged, dear,” Mary said.  “In New York, it’s nine a.m.”

“But Terry…” I lowered my voice, and in my desperation for Mary’s hunch to _not_ be true (it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true) I was willing to share some incredibly private information.  “Terry, my husband, he was infertile.  It’s impossible, or, I guess, statistically improbable to the point that it may as well have been impossible.  That was the justification for the in vitro.  And I never… there was nobody else, after we were married.”

Mary’s expression was kind indeed, but now I recognized sadness.

“You’re late, aren’t you,” she said, taking my hand in hers.

I shook my head, frantic.  “It’s the stress.  Stress can upset your cycle.  It happened to me when I was defending my dissertation, and during that first year at the Met.  And this week has been worse than any other period in my life so _that’s_ the explanation.  I am not… I _cannot_ be pregnant.”

“Shh, shh,” Mary said.  “I know you’re thinking that you’re not capable of doing this, but you can.  You’re young, much younger than I am certainly, and you’ve already raised a surprisingly normal-seeming little boy, despite his paternity.  Life is piling up on you now but when you have a little distance, you’ll see that everything is going to be fine.”

She was right, of course—about the pregnancy, if not the pep talk.  When I thought about it, I realized that my period had been late _before_ the car accident.  Trauma wasn’t an explanation.  I waspregnant.  I couldn’t be, but I was.  And now I could feel myself tearing up.  I was congested too, as if my sinuses already knew I was about to break down and sob into a total stranger’s shoulder.

No.  Not now, in this apartment, with these people.  Not with my little boy in the other room.

I withdrew my hand from Mary’s and took a deep breath.  I looked at myself in the mirror—I had quelled the storm before my makeup could betray me, which was a very small consolation.  I hummed a few bars from _Je veux vivre_ , and I laughed.  I could see Mary’s reflection in the mirror.  She pitied me.

* * * 

Mama was in the bathroom for a long time, but for a while I think I was the only one who noticed.  My father and Uncle Sherlock were in the kitchen arguing, and Uncle John and Aunt Mary were trying to distract me, I guess.  I knew they weren’t _really_ my aunt and uncle, but they were trying to be.  I think they felt bad about who my real family was.  They were nice.  Aunt Mary cut me a slice of cake.

“So, what do you like to do for fun, Arthur?” she asked.

I could always tell Mama liked it when I acted ordinary around strangers, and I didn’t want to make her sad when she was already so sad about my old dad, so I told them I liked to read.  It was almost true, since I did read a lot, but I didn’t say the whole truth, which was that lately I was reading my dead grandpa’s philosophy books from when he was a theologian, and I was halfway through the New Testament in Koine.

“Well that’s lovely,” Aunt Mary said, smiling at me in a nice way.

“What’s your favorite book?” Uncle John asked.

“The Prince.”  It just slipped out.  _Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are._ I knew what Niccolo Machiavelli meant by that.  But when I saw the bewildered expressions on their faces, I realized maybe I shouldn’t have told the truth about this.

“The _Little_ Prince,” I corrected myself.  “About the boy who lives on an asteroid.  We drew pictures of it in school.”

Uncle John relaxed, but I think Aunt Mary knew I was lying again.  She was smart.  I could always tell smart people.  Uncle John was smart too, but not in the same way.  He was more like my old dad.

“It’s about an asteroid but there’s not any science in it,” I added.  “Real science fiction’s good too.  I read Ender’s Game this year, and then my old dad took me to see the movie.”

I really did like _Ender’s Game,_ so that wasn’t a lie.  It reminded me of Machiavelli.  _If an injury has to be done to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared._   Ender always felt bad about destroying people, but he did it anyway.  I think he wouldn’t have done it if all the adults hadn’t lied to him about everything.

“Did you enjoy the movie?”

I shrugged.  “It was okay.  The special effects were cool, but they took out a lot of stuff that was in the book.  Like Ender’s brother and sister taking over the Internet.”

Uncle John laughed.  “I remember that part—Peter and Val, right?  Val was the sweet little sister, and Peter was the mean older brother.”  His glance strayed toward my father.

“Peter was mean sometimes but he wasn’t bad,” I said.  I suddenly felt like I had to defend an imaginary character.  “He had to protect Ender and Valentine.  He was a good Hegemon in the end.”

“Hegemon?” Aunt Mary asked.

“President of the world,” I said.

John glanced at Mary.  "Remind you of anyone?" he muttered.

"Oh hush," Mary said.

My father and Uncle Sherlock’s voices were getting louder and I could hear little pieces of what they were, even though they didn’t make a lot of sense. 

“… dare expose her in front of everyone when her husband…”

“…doesn’t know yet! I’m only saying…”

“… business and _not_ yours, Sherlock, so…”

Uncle John and Aunt Mary looked at each other in a way that’s hard to describe.  It’s like they were having a telepathic conversation.  Married people do that, I guess.  Mama and Terry used to do it.

“Eat some more cake,” Aunt Mary said, patting my knee.  “We’re going to go talk to your… umm… to the others.”

They joined my father and Uncle Sherlock in the kitchen and everyone started talking very quietly.  I pretended I was only paying attention to my cake, but of course I was watching them.  After a minute Aunt Mary went down the hallway and knocked on the bathroom door.  _Beatrice?_ I heard her say.  _Beatrice are you all right in there?_   Then the door opened and shut again and I couldn’t hear a sound.

My father, and Uncle Sherlock, and Uncle John were all looking at me now.

“Arthur,” my father said, his expression grim.  “Do you play the violin?”

I shook my head.

“Then your Uncle Sherlock must show you.  You can go practice in Mrs. Hudson’s apartment, I’m sure she would enjoy it.  _Brother?_ ”

Uncle Sherlock didn’t look very happy but he rummaged around behind the couch where I was sitting and pulled out a violin case.  I followed him out of the room, but as we were going through the front door I saw my mama coming out of the bathroom.  She had the strangest look on her face, like she was staring into nothing.

“Mycroft,” she said.  She sounded so sad that I wanted to run up to her and hug her around the neck like I used to when I was little, but then Uncle Sherlock shut the door and we were separated.

* * * 

“John and I are going to say our goodbyes downstairs,” Mary said, squeezing my shoulder.  “We’ll see you again soon, I hope.”

“We bought Mrs. Hudson an electric blanket—she’s always complaining about the drafts in this place,” John said.  “But maybe you can give it to Arthur?  Since it’s not really her birthday.”

“Thank you,” I said, though I’m sure I didn’t sound very grateful.  “That’s kind of you.”

Mary smiled at me weakly, and they left.

“Mycroft,” I said again, once they were gone.

“You should sit down,” he suggested.  “You’ve had a shock." 

“People always say that in movies,” I said listlessly.

“Yes, well.”

“People are always telling me to sit down.”

“You should be careful of your health.”

I laughed, a horrible sound I’m sure.  “My health, of course.  Of course you know.  When did you figure it out?  When you walked in the door?  No, who am I kidding?  I’ll bet your sixth sense started tingling the last time Terry and I slept together before he got eviscerated by an SUV outside the Museum of Natural History!”

Mycroft didn’t respond.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, collapsing into a chair at the kitchen table.  “Jesus Fucking Christ.”

Mycroft took the seat across from me, silent.  I wondered if he had ever been shouted at by a pregnant widow before.  I wondered…

Holy shit.

“Do you have other children?” I asked, with a sudden flash of insight.

“Certainly not.”  His tone was contemptuous.

“But you wouldn’t tell me if you did!”  I was aghast.  “You do, of course you do.  I’m just the lucky one who got found out.”

“You are hysterical, Béatrice,” he said drily.  “In more ways than one.”

“Don’t you _dare_ ridicule me.  You’re the reason Terry’s dead, and Art’s in danger— which you still haven’t explained, by the way.  _You_ are the reason my life turned to shit!”

“ _I_ am the reason your life has been golden for the last seven years.”  His expression was frigid.  “Isn’t that right?”

I felt my hands clench under the table.

“ _Isn’t that right._ ”

“Fine!  It’s right!  You’re right,” I conceded at last.  “You know I know that.  There’s no reason to be needlessly cruel.”

Mycroft tapped his fingers on the tabletop.  He wasn’t going to apologize, I could see that, but I think he regretted bullying the mother of his child, who happened to be pregnant with her dead husband’s baby.

“You must believe me in this, Béatrice.  There aren’t any other children.”  He was speaking very intently, almost earnest.  “The risk is too great.  You understand that now, tragically.  I regret putting you in this position, considering what transpired, but nothing has changed.  I will raise Arthur, and your husband’s child of course—”

“Of course?”  I couldn’t comprehend what I was hearing.  “You have nothing to do with him, her, whatever it is.  It’s mine and Terry’s.  You think nothing’s changed?  This changes _everything_.  I’m going to my mother’s house, I’m taking Arthur with me, and if you mean to fight me on this you’ll have to take me to court.  You’d probably win, being… whoever it is you are.  But I promise you that if you try I will make a lot of noise, and I know you don’t want that.”

I think Mycroft was actually stunned.

“You’re not thinking clearly,” he said, and I hated how calm he was.  “If you leave, if you talk, you _will_ be targeted.  Just like in New York.”

“You mean _Arthur_ will be targeted.”

“No,” he said.  “ _You._   Now that you’re having another child—”

“It’s not your child, Mycroft.”

Mycroft slammed his hand on the table.  “But _he_ will think it is.”

“What?  He?  Who’s ‘he’?”

Mycroft gave me his coldest stare yet.

“Moriarty.”


	4. Juliette

 

When I was in college I read a late-19th century short story called “The Yellow Wallpaper”—an example of proto-feminist American literature, my professor told us.  It’s narrated in the first person, by an unnamed woman whose husband diagnoses her with that catch-all of Victorian diseases: “hysteria.”

“And what can one do?” she asks.  “If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?”

The house he confines her in is a “colonial mansion,” quite beautiful and quite abandoned.

She lies abed in her attic room all summer, staring at the strangely patterned yellow wallpaper surrounding her.  Then over the course of the story, she starts to go crazy.  She sees a woman moving in the wallpaper, trapped there, unable to escape.  And then  _she_ is the woman in the wallpaper, and it’s an incredibly effective narrative device—the narrator’s descent into madness.

Naturally, it’s an allegory for the cult of the domestic sphere and women’s exclusion from society in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  When I read it way, way back (I think it was 1999, when I took my first course in literary criticism), that part was immediately apparent.  To the children of second-wave feminists, the story isn’t exactly  _subtle_.  But in 2014 I wasn’t worried about metaphor.

I was quite literally locked in a beautiful, empty house.  No gaudy wallpaper, of course, and no women watching me from the walls (yet), but still a confinement.  In the three months since Art and I had returned to London and met the family, I’d spoken to exactly three people: Mycroft Holmes, my son, and once, Mary Watson, who called to tell me she’d had her baby girl.  My own  _mother_  didn’t know I was an hour’s drive from her house.  She didn’t know about the pregnancy.  She only knew what Mycroft wanted me to tell her, which was that I’d taken Art to the south of France (a lie) to recover from the shock of Terry’s death (not that Art was even upset), and that I might not call for a while because I needed to grieve alone,  _and please I know you can respect that, mother, since you did it yourself not so long ago._

Of course I couldn’t tell her that “a while” meant “until someone catches or kills the criminal mastermind who is bizarrely obsessed with Art’s biological uncle and thus a danger to us all.  The crazy man on the television.  You remember him, don’t you?”

_It’s just a temporary nervous depression_ , I said instead.

The funny thing is—if anything about this could be called funny—I never even saw “Moriarty” when he took over all the TV screens in London.  It happened the day after the accident in New York, and at that point I wasn’t paying attention to the news.  I was so busy making arrangements for Terry’s burial and our flight back to England next week that I didn’t hear about it until Mycroft explained in 221b Baker Street.

“As I hope you see now,” he’d said when he completed his brief recap of current events; “Neither my brother nor I have time for distractions, family related or otherwise.”  (As if to prove the point that his time was precious, he’d been texting intermittently throughout the conversation.)  Then he made an ultimatum, and I really do remember this word for word because it played over and over in my head for days:

“When Moriarty has been dealt with,” he said, “you can play the litigious American and sue for custody, if that makes you feel less ineffectual in the face of the world, but until then I am taking Arthur.  In fact, it would be more accurate to say that I already have taken Arthur, because while we were chatting I sent instructions to have my son returned to my house, and he will not leave that house until I can be sure that it is safe for him to do so. 

“You, of course, are free to go to your mother’s or wherever it is you wish because you are correct, I have no claim on either your late husband’s child or you.  However, as I do not see how it would be to my son’s developmental benefit to lose his mother so directly after his foster father’s death—and you would die, that’s nearly a certainty—I hope you will think of Arthur’s well-being rather than your own grief or your pride, and come live with us until this is over.”

The point of an ultimatum is to make it impossible for someone to refuse a particular demand.  The word is the past participle of the Latin  _ultimare_ , which means “to come to an end.”  But Mycroft clearly wasn’t concerned with any single, individual end.  I think he wanted to destroy resistance entirely—make it impossible for me to argue, about anything, ever again.  It really wasn’t malice.  I think debating with ordinary people was just too inefficient a use of Mycroft Holmes’s time.

Which is why he kidnapped my son, apparently, because it’s like they say—actions speak louder than words.

_And what can one do?_  asked the woman in the yellow wallpaper.   _What is one to do?_

“I have a very large house, Béatrice,” Mycroft said.  “We can avoid each other indefinitely.”

So we lived like that for a while.

* * * 

My mother knocked on my door at 8:04 in the morning.

She and Terry had woken me up at 8:04 on my birthday every year, and she probably thought keeping to that tradition would help me.  I didn’t want to make her sad, so even though I’d been awake and reading since before six I jumped back into bed at exactly eight and waited for her.

“Wake up, Art!” she said in a sing-song voice, tip-toeing into my room.  “This is the very minute you were born seven years ago!”

I pretended to wake up.  I even yawned, to look convincing.

“Hi, Mama,” I said.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she said, sitting down on the side of the bed and brushing my hair out of my face.  Her hand touched my glasses—suddenly I realized that I had forgotten to take them off when I got back into bed.  “Did you sleep in your glasses again, Art?”

I nodded, trying to look embarrassed.  “I stayed up late reading last night, Mama.  I’m sorry.  I’ll be more careful next time.”

She believed me.  She almost always believed me, because she wanted to believe.  She didn’t give the glasses a second thought.

“Do you want cake for breakfast?” she asked, smiling.

That was another thing we’d always done: birthday cake for breakfast.  My mother said  _her_  mother did that for her, so it was a second-generation tradition already.

“Art?  Are you too tired still?  Should I let you sleep a little longer?”

“No, no,” I sat up in bed.  “I’m awake.  It’s just… can… umm, can my father have cake with us too?”

It was like a shadow crossed over her face.  They were in a fight.  It wasn’t  _fighting_ , like she and Terry used to do, hissing at each other angrily when they thought I couldn’t hear them.  It was more like they’d had a big fight before and the memory of it was a raincloud that followed them around.  Sometimes she forgot, but then something would remind her and you could see the cloud creep up onto her face.  Now it was me who had just reminded her.

“Your father’s at work, sweetheart.  He leaves very early, remember?”

“Not on Sundays,” I said.  “On Sundays he runs on the treadmill and then he goes to his club at nine.”

Sometimes I say things before I think about how they’re going to affect other people, and that makes them upset or nervous.  I was better at it when I went to school every day but now I wasn’t allowed to leave the house and there was nobody to practice on except my mama, because my father didn’t care.  This time I’d forgotten that my mother didn’t usually wake up before nine on Sundays.  She and my father seemed to have everything perfectly choreographed so they almost never had to talk to each other.  They could go weeks without even seeing each other, and this time it had been closer to a month.

“It’s okay, Mama, we don’t have to—”

“Of course he can have cake with us!” she jumped in, doing her best to sound cheerful.  I knew what she was thinking:  _It’s Art’s birthday.  He hardly sees Mycroft.  It’s not fair to make a child choose between his parents._ I knew she felt bad about that.  And I also wondered, sometimes, if she felt bad because she thought I wouldn’t choose  _her_.  I tried not to think about it too often—to be honest, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t choose my father over her.  But I wasn’t being forced to take sides just yet, so there was no point in making her sad.  She was so sad already. 

“You go find him and I’ll get the cake ready, all right?”  She smiled at me and it almost looked like a real smile.  “Don’t run too fast,” she said.  “It’s seven candles this year and you need to save your breath.”

“Okay, Mama,” I promised.

My father wasn’t running like usual, and I figured he must have gone to his club early.  I thought maybe he remembered it was my birthday and decided not to intrude on me and my mother.  The idea gave me mixed feelings; I was relieved, and then a little disappointed.

But when I got to the kitchen they were both there, my mother  _and_  my father, and there was a cake and a small pile of presents on the island.  It was a truce, for me, and I felt the same strange mix of emotions I always did when I saw them together.  A sort of anxious happiness.  Another day I didn’t have to choose.

“Happy birthday, Arthur,” my father said.  “Why aren’t you dressed?”

I was in my pajamas still, because if I had changed into normal clothes I would have given myself away to my mother.  I couldn’t exactly explain that in front of her, though.

“My mother always wakes me up on the minute I was born, sir,” I said.  “So I slept in until then today.  I’m sorry.”

“Ahh,” my father said.  It hadn’t taken him a second to understand what I’d meant.  When we first got to London I thought he could read minds, but that was a stupid thought of course.  He was just smarter than other people.  He told me, once, that I could learn to intuit what others were thinking if I paid attention.  He was always saying I didn’t pay enough attention.  “Well, you’ll have to change after breakfast because we’re going to the hospital at nine-thirty, and we can’t be late.”

My mother had been smiling, tremulously, but I saw the blood drain out of her face just then.  She had her arms held awkwardly away from her stomach, as if she didn’t want to touch where the baby was, or even think about it.  She was so stiff, standing next to my father against the kitchen counter.

“I’m five months pregnant, Art,” she said, as if on cue.  “Which means we can find out whether it’s a boy or a girl.  Your father… decided that we should all go together when I have the ultrasound.  Doesn’t that… doesn’t that sound like a good idea, sweetheart?”

I could tell my mother didn’t think it was a good idea.  I could tell my mother didn’t want to go.  But anyone could’ve seen that—it didn’t take any special intelligence or deductive powers to look at her face and recognize dread.

_You will be an older brother in a matter of months,_  my father had told me when my mother went to the hospital for her first check-up.   _Do you understand what kind of responsibility that is?_

_Yes, sir,_  I’d said.  We were in my father’s study, reviewing the calculus problem sets he’d assigned me the week before.

_And do you understand why your mother is going to need you to be especially helpful with the baby?_ he continued.

I remember that I’d looked away then to stare at the papers on his desk.  We were working on “transcendental functions.”  I’d thought that was about right.

_Arthur._

_Because she has prenatal depression, and that makes it more likely that she’ll have postpartum depression after the baby’s born,_  I said, even though I felt, illogically, like I was giving her away somehow.  Obviously my father knew, and I knew too, but I’d never said the words out loud.

My father frowned.   _I expect you know that none of this is her fault._

_Yes, sir,_  I said.   _I know._

“Arthur,” my father prompted.  “Your mother asked you a question.”

“Yes, Mama,” I said.  “I think it’s a good idea.  Can I blow out the candles now?”

She sang “Happy Birthday” in a funny operatic way, like she always had, but we were silent as we ate.  Every couple minutes I would see my mother wince, and I knew it was because the baby was kicking.  My father gave me a telling look across the table.  I reached out and held her hand, but I don't think it helped.

 * * *

Art and Mycroft were playing Monopoly on Art’s iPad as we sat in my obstetrician’s waiting room.  They were ruthless—when I was a kid Monopoly games had taken hours, but in fifteen minutes the two of them had demolished their computerized opponents and were now turning on each other.

“Would you like to join us, Béatrice?” Mycroft had asked, courteously, before the game began.

“You two would murder me,” I said.  Or worse, they would patronize me and let me get further in the game than I rightly should have.  It was the strangest thing, how I could forget—around my son and his father—that Mycroft had once told me I had a near-genius intelligence.

That was another life.  In  _this_  one, I was forever “hysterical” and “not thinking clearly.”

But I knew this was a peace offering—not the invitation to join in a board game, but bringing Art to the doctor’s office.  The last time I’d come for an exam I had been terrified that Mycroft had changed his mind, that I wouldn’t be allowed back, that I would be separated from my son forever.  Because I was depressed, because I wasn’t as good a mother as he had anticipated, because I had shaky hands lately and dropped a very old, very valuable vase when I was filling it with water.  A whole host of reasons.

And would Art have been upset to lose me?

I watched him and Mycroft together and couldn’t be sure.  Sometimes I thought it was selfish to stay.  The laser-focused, intense way they looked at everything… how could genetics mean so much?  Terry raised him for six years, but it was like they’d never happened.  And now Art was lying to me—I knew that.  The two of them were thick as thieves behind my back, father and son, so bizarrely alike. 

I wasn’t stupid.  Art never fell asleep with his glasses on.  He was careful of the things he owned.  Just like his father. 

“You know, there was a joke we used to tell in grad school,” I said.  The memory had come to me out of nowhere; I hadn’t thought about school in so long.  “ _Ahem_ ,” I said, clearing my throat.  “Why do American historians always lose at Monopoly? … It’s because they just keep throwing money at the railroads until there’s an agrarian revolt.”

I didn’t look up to gauge their reaction.  Certainly neither of them laughed loud enough to hear, if they laughed at all.

“Or… there was another one,” I continued, still looking away.  “Why do Civil War historians always lose at Monopoly?”

“Because they try to buy real estate with Confederate money,” Mycroft answered.

“That’s right,” I said, finally looking up.  Mycroft looked mildly amused; Art was grinning.

“You and your friends must have really hated historians, Mama.”

I had to laugh.  “No, we were jealous of them.  The history department always had more funding than the English department, and the history department didn’t have very much.”

“Did the historians tell jokes about your department?” Art asks.

“Oh, I’m sure they did.  You know what they say about academics,” I said.  “The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”

“After you have the baby, are you going to be a singer again?” Art asked.  “Or do you want to be a professor?”

It was odd—I hadn’t thought about it.  In a strange way, I couldn’t comprehend actually  _having_  the baby.  I couldn’t envision it, and I didn’t want to.  Once I had it… I didn’t know what happened next.  I could leave.  I could take the child and leave.  Or I could leave it with Mycroft and Art and go alone.  Or I could leave with Art and the baby too.  I wanted nothing more than I wanted that last option.

“… turn your dissertation into a book and publish it.  Or you could sing again, like when we lived in New York.  Remember when you used to sing  _Je veux vivre_  before I went to sleep and Terry would accompany you on the piano?  That was even before I knew French.  Dad said that was the first song he ever heard you sing.  Remember?”

I hadn’t been listening to Art for a few moments, but this woke me up.

“That’s not the first song Terry heard me sing, sweetheart,” I said, confused.  “Who told you that?”

“Oh, no I…”  Art trailed off, looking up at Mycroft like he’d made a mistake.  “I meant… my real father.”

And that’s when I knew that I could never take Art away from Mycroft Holmes.

“Will you sing  _Je veux vivre_ , Mama?  When we get home?” Art asked, hesitant.  “For my birthday?”

“I’m too old to play Juliette, sweetheart,” I said. 

* * * 

The contractions were breathtaking—breathtaking in the most literal sense—and I wanted to be in a hospital bed but instead I was in Mycroft’s house because  _Sherlock’s close, Béatrice, but we can’t take any risks_.  I hadn’t left the house since Art’s seventh birthday.

_It’s your Age of Reason birthday,_ Mycroft had told him as we were driving back from the doctor’s office.

This pregnancy had been harder than with Art, but the labor didn’t last as long. 

_Thomas Paine?_  I asked, confused.

_I’ve been reading canon law,_  Art explained.

As soon as I fell back onto the bed exhausted, it seemed, the door opened and Mycroft walked in.

_Catholics say age seven is when children start to have moral responsibility,_  Art continued.

_Which is important because you’re going to have a little sister and we have to take care of her,_ Mycroft said.  _Don’t we?_

“Here’s your daughter, Mr. Holmes,” the nurse said, handing the baby to Mycroft, who took it awkwardly in his arms.

“A beautiful little girl,” the doctor said to him.  “She has your blue eyes, see?”

“Babies always have blue eyes,” I said dourly.  “Art’s eyes were blue, and now they’re black.  Like mine.”

The doctor smiled at me.  “You’ll see,” she said patiently.  “She’s going to look just like her father.  Now, have you two decided what you want to name her?  I can fill out the paperwork right away.”

I turned my head away on the pillow.  I couldn’t bear to look at Mycroft, and I couldn’t bear to look at the baby.

“She’s yours,” I told him.   _Everything is yours eventually._   “You name her.”

I heard the infant begin to coo when Mycroft handed it off to the doctor, but the sound didn’t bring me any joy—not like when Art had been born.  I tried to remember what that had felt like, tried to manufacture it for the sake of the baby, but I couldn’t.  It was like a dream fading away bit by bit, and soon I wouldn’t have anything except a nagging pull in the back of my mind telling me that something used to be there that wasn’t there anymore.

Then I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew I was waking up to a buzzing sound coming from the nightstand.  The moment I opened my eyes I wished I hadn’t.  Sleep was blissful, sleep was oblivion.  But I felt compelled to look at my phone.  It was a message from Mycroft, a picture of the birth certificate.

JULIE HOLMES

That’s what it said.  That was the truth.


	5. Moriarty

 

Julie lit a cigarette.  She was stretched out on a towel on our hotel balcony, catching sun in a bikini our father would never have approved of, enjoying the Southern California weather.  I’d been paging through her sketchbook—graphite on dead tree paper, if you can believe it—and I’d noticed several line drawings of me around the house.  I was just doing ordinary things—like playing chess with Dad or cooking breakfast—but always scowling.

“Dad should send you to the States more often, don’t you think?  London’s so dreary this time of year.”  She took a drag.  “Can you believe it’s only April?”

I grabbed the cigarette and tossed it off the balcony. “You shouldn’t smoke.  You’ll kill yourself.  Or do you think that would suit your image as a melancholic artist?”  My little sister, insouciant to her very core.  “For crying out loud, Julie, it’s 2028.  If you _must_ have a vice, at least make it a modern one.”

“Well you’re in a dour mood today,” she said, peering at me over the top of her sunglasses.  “Did you get some sand in your penny loafers?  Or do you just not like my sketches?”

I looked at her closed-mouth smile and her crystalline blue eyes.

“You’re getting good,” I said.  “Though I begin to wonder if you insist on drawing our family over and over because you’re at a loss when your subjects aren’t constantly scowling.”

Julie laughed and propped herself up on an elbow.  “Would you prefer a still life?  Some fruit, maybe a couple dead rabbits?”  She paused to adjust her swimsuit top—I looked away decorously.  “Why are there so many paintings of dead rabbits from the 18th century, Art?  Hunting still lifes, as a genre, are just the strangest thing.  I mean, the point of the hunt is the action, isn’t it?  That’s what makes it exciting.”

“And what do you know about hunting?”

Julie slapped at a fly.  “Not much, I suppose.  Not with, like, weapons.  But _psychologically_ , I am forever hunting.  That’s what art is for.”

I rolled my eyes.  “I can never tell when you’re actually being pretentious or pretending to be pretentious to irritate me.”

“Oh, brother mine,” she said with an exaggerated sigh, lying back on her beach towel.  “You think so little of me.  But you are the great Arthur Holmes, after all, the boy genius!”

 _Boy genius._   Julie was always making comments like that, joking that I had a superpower, _the creepy Holmes brainpower power,_ she called it, but what I really wanted was the power to make my sister take things seriously.  Just once.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Julie,” I said.  “I don’t think you’re silly.  Tell me… tell me about your drawing.  Tell me something serious and I promise I’ll believe you.”

Julie smiled a very little.  “All right, brother,” she said.  “Turn to the last page in my sketchbook.  Go on, I dare you.”

I did as she instructed.

It was a picture of me and Mum, sitting on a bench holding hands, but I was just a child licking an ice cream cone.  It was a pretty picture, drawn in more detail than Julie’s usual hasty sketches—she’d clearly spent time on this one, even adding color to the background with oil pastels.  A spring day at the London Zoo it looked like, considering the cages behind us.  A lovely scene, I thought, until I looked closer and saw that Julie had drawn this horrible blank expression on Mum’s face.  She was staring at something just off the page.  I remembered that day, that expression—and the man she was looking at.  I remember thinking she had already resigned herself to dying.

“Julie… this is incredibly disturbing.”  I shook my head, like I could shake the memories out of it.  “Why would you draw this?  Why would you show this to me?”

Julie shrugged.  “I’m just trying to understand you, Art.  Through your childhood traumas.”

I wanted to toss the book aside but somehow the drawing had me transfixed.  The hopelessness on Mum’s face, the crowd milling around oblivious, the shadow of a very frightening personage barely visible on the sidewalk in the drawing.  Julie hadn’t been there.  Julie had barely been born, but she’d intuited what it must have looked like.  I knew she felt like an outsider sometimes, but she knew us.  She had creepy insight too, my little sister.

I remembered how Mum had clutched my hand that day and told me not to be afraid.

“It’s a hunt scene, see?” Julie said.  “You and Mum are the rabbits.”

* * *

Mycroft must have hired someone to take care of the baby for the first few days, because the next time I woke up I found a sweet-looking gray-haired matron sitting across the room, rocking Julie.  Once she saw my eyes open she introduced herself but truth be told, I didn’t remember her name.  I didn’t remember a word she said, except that she said a lot—jabbering on about her children and her grandchildren and always, always _what a beautiful baby she is you’re so lucky Mrs. Holmes what a joy!_   I didn’t mind the chatter; I didn’t hear it.

“ _I cry at nothing, and I cry most of the time_ ,” I told the woman one night.  I was quoting “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but I suppose I couldn’t have expected her to know that.

“Hush, hush now, Mrs. Holmes,” she replied, patting my hand as I sank back into the bed.  “You have nothing to worry about.  I’ve taken care of so many babies you have no idea!  Little Julie will be perfectly safe with me while you recover.  Your husband’s arranged everything, so as long as you and your daughter need me I—”

“My husband’s dead,” I said.  “And I don’t have a daughter.”

She was very kind.  Mycroft must have paid her a lot of money to be so kind, and to pretend she didn’t think I was a horrible mother.

“It’s not your fault, Mum,” Art said, on the first day I wasn’t crying as soon as I woke up and told the old matron she could let my son in.  I hadn’t wanted him to see me before, not like I was right after the birth.  “It’s not your fault,” he said again, and I wanted to believe that he believed it, but he was standing so stiffly at my bedside that I doubted it.  He used to call me Mama, and run and greet me at the door when I came home from the Met.  He used to call me Mama, but now he called me Mum and I know that seems like a marginal difference but it mattered because Art was born in New York—remember?—and he’d spoken like an American.  He had a proper British accent now.  Where did this Received Pronunciation come from?  I was depressed, and I was overwrought, but I was clear about this small semantic change: that it meant a shift in Art’s loyalties.  And God, who could blame him?

I considered, then, that I would have to leave.

I got out of bed that day, and held Julie for a few minutes.  She did have blue eyes—not the dark cloudy blue that infants have, but a bright, clear cerulean that was almost green in certain lights.  “They really do look like her father’s,” I said.  But then maybe I only imagined saying it, because the matron didn’t seem to hear me.

And then I caught my breath in my chest because I realized that I hadn’t been thinking of Terry.

So that decided it.

I pulled out my laptop and started surfing job postings on the Modern Language Association website—writing, literature, linguistics.  I was still smart.  It’s hard to believe, you know, but I’d been considered quite the best in my cohort at Cambridge. 

 _Perfect health and a genius IQ_.

Well seven years had changed the first part, but the second remained.  I had friends from grad school I’d kept in touch with—with jobs in academia, or in publishing.  The very literary types were the ones I’d talked to most over the years; they liked the idea of having an admirably reckless _artiste_ in their contact list (though I would hardly have described myself with any of those words).  They called me by my stage name when we spoke on the phone.  I wasn’t supposed to use the phone, but that seemed excessive, so I figured: screw it, Mycroft Holmes.

“Béa!  It’s been so long, love!  What can I do for you?”

“Oh Amelia,” I said— _or Oh Thomas, Oh Richard, Oh Margaret, Oh Madison_ —“I have the most terrible news.”

And then I told them Terry was dead, _did you hear?_ , and though I’d tried to go it on my own with Art for a while it was too hard.  I needed security, a stable job with regular hours.  I needed, _and I hate to put this on you, and I don’t expect anything please believe me,_ to go back to academia.

I didn’t expect the sort of job offers I’d gotten when I’d just gotten my doctorate, departmental luminary that I was then.  I’d been out of the loop for nearly a decade; I had no idea what the new disciplinary trends were (we’d all been rabid “new historicists” when I was a student, but who knew what the buzzwords were now).  Still, I had my dissertation, and my old friends helped my shop it around.  Even some of my rivals helped—they were happy to condescend to me, those hacks.  They had new gossip now.  _Remember that Béatrice Marchand from Cambridge?  Well her husband died and she’s stuck with a son and I feel bad for her of course, but that’s what happens when you make impulsive life decisions._

It wasn’t long before I had a job offer.  I booked a flight and packed a small suitcase.  And somehow, this made me feel better.  I was taking action—I was making my own choices—I was leaving this house.

I was leaving my son.

At some point, I knew, I would have to tell them—Art and Mycroft, both of which conversations would be terrible in their own ways.  With Art it would be guilt; with Mycroft… dread.  I thought of that night after the British Library performance, wondering only half-jokingly if I were talking to serial killer.

For goodness sake he had a livestream of the reception on a screen set into the wall.  In 2006, it had been like walking onto the set of some futuristic spy movie.  Now of course I’d need to see holograms to be impressed, but for all I knew Mycroft did have holograms in his real office—wherever it was, whatever he did.

Even without holograms, though, and even knowing he wasn’t going to murder any of us, Mycroft remained intimidating.  Art was formal around him, constantly anxious, biting the inside of his cheek.  But he was anxious for approval, that’s all.  Art wasn’t afraid of his father; only afraid to disappoint him.

And I was afraid of having my mind changed.

My flight was on a Wednesday, and I told Mycroft the Sunday before.

I picked Sunday because Art was right—Mycroft did jog on the treadmill for an hour every Sunday morning before leaving for the Diogenes Club, about which he was as cryptic as everything in his life that happened outside of the house.  _I would prefer that you not pursue this line of questioning, Béatrice._   I’d heard that more than once.  It didn’t matter, though; if it was one of the things that made life dangerous for Art, then I didn’t _want_ to know.

The point about Sunday is that I thought if I interrupted Mycroft jogging, I’d give myself some small advantage.  The treadmill was in a sunny room on the east side of the house, and was overall a less intimidating space than the spy movie office.  And he couldn’t hide behind an imposing desk.  And he wouldn’t look like the grim reaper’s solicitor in a perfectly pressed suit.

So I knocked on the door, and heard the machine power down.

“I will tell you once more, Arthur, and only once more.  You may _only_ hack in your spare time.  And you should be done with Latin by now, why this is taking you so long is beyond—”  Mycroft opened the door halfway through the sentence.  “Me,” he finished.

“Good morning, Mycroft,” I said pleasantly, stepping into the room, sighing when I felt the sun.  It was a perfect spring morning.

“Béatrice,” he said.  “I didn’t realize you were awake.”

“I didn’t realize Art was a computer hacker,” I replied.  “He used to be a very good composer, you know.  Why do you think he gave it up?”

Mycroft’s face was flushed, from the running mostly, but I think perhaps a miniscule part of it was embarrassment.

“No matter,” I said lightly.  “A son of _yours_ shouldn’t be writing sonatas.  He should be writing code and breaking through firewalls and—well that’s about the extent of my computer jargon, but I’m sure you grasp the idea.”

Mycroft seemed to be watching my face very closely.  “I’m glad to see you so… cheerful.  Arthur will be pleased as well.”

I was surprised by the tone in Mycroft’s voice—hardly arch at all.  It was strange.

I had intended to be aloof and inexorable, a fortress against any speech Mycroft could have possibly used to make me back down.  But of course it hadn’t worked.  Mycroft looking sweaty and uncomfortable in exercise clothes didn’t make things easier.  Jesus Christ, it made him look like a normal person.

“He loves you, I think,” I said suddenly.

Mycroft was clearly taken aback, so before he could say anything I plugged onward—

“Your son, he adores you.  He’d do anything to make you happy—read Cicero, engage in cyber-terrorism… if you told him to.  And I can’t see that changing; he’s not going to cause you any trouble; he was the most _dutiful_ little boy when we lived in New York, only wanted to please us.  Anyway the point is, you don’t have to worry that he’ll turn into a tattooed teenage rebel in the next few years.  He’ll bypass that phase—I did, you know, and if he’s anything like me it’s probably this, that he doesn’t want to fail the people he loves and… And…”  I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down.  I’d started talking faster and faster toward the end so that now I was a little dizzy.  “And he loves you, so, if you’re worried—and of course you wouldn’t be—but if you _were_ worried, you’ll be a fine father.”

_BOOM._

There was a pounding on the window and I saw a dark figure out of my peripheral vision.  I was too alarmed to do anything but jump, and then stare at the window while my brain processed what was happening.  In those same seconds, Mycroft did several things in rapid succession: he stepped in front of me, a black cylindrical object appeared in his hand seemingly out of nowhere, and then, with the greatest exasperation, he dropped his defensive posture and shouted _“Sherlock what the BLOODY hell are you doing outside my house?”_

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, clapping my hands over my head.

Sherlock Holmes pointed at me through the window.  “I was reading your lips!” he shouted, his voice muffled on the other side of the glass.  “Very moving speech!  Let us in, will you?”

“ _Us?”_   Mycroft glowered at his brother.

“John’s at the front gate,” Sherlock called back.  “You weren’t answering the buzzer!”

* * *

Art was smiling—relaxed, like he never was at the house.  I bought him an ice cream cone: a scoop of vanilla on a scoop of mint chocolate chip on a scoop of cookies and cream.  The leaning tower of sugar headaches looked like it was going to topple over at any moment but Art kept it upright.  And soon it wasn’t so tall anyway.

“How did Uncle Sherlock and Uncle John catch the man from the television, Mum?” Art asked as we stepped into the Butterfly Paradise.  He turned around in a circle on the spot, looking up at the dome overheard and the winged insects flitting around everywhere.

“I don’t know, love,” I said.  “I’m sure it will be on the news soon, once all the important people have worked out the details of what happened.”

“Are we important people, Mum?” Art asked.

I laughed.  “You’re important to me, and to your father, and to Uncle Sherlock I’m sure.”

Art’s little quizzical smile was fading, his eyebrows drawn low over narrowed eyes.  I could tell he was thinking—trying to put pieces together—but I was afraid if he thought too hard he would realize what this day out was _really_ about.  I tried to distract him.

“Art,” I said.  “How many butterflies do you think are under the glass with us?”

If my mother had asked me that when I was a kid, I would have done something like count all the butterflies on one bush, and try to extrapolate from there.  But Art was drawing lines in the air, mapping the dome and the contours of the landscape beneath, noting the topiary and determining which species of _Lepidoptera_ ate what and bred where.  Intent on his task, he hardly blinked.  When he did, I imagined I heard the click of a camera shutter as each moment entered his photographic memory.

The London Zoo had been a good idea—I’d owe Sherlock for the plan, if I thought I’d ever see him again.

* * *

“Will you let us in, brother, or shall I wait out here?” Sherlock asked again, knocking on the window.  “I have very, very happy news for you and yours.”

So Mycroft waved him around to the front door, visibly irritated, and we went to meet them.  But as we walked, I had to ask—

“What was that thing you were holding back there by the window—before you realized it was Sherlock outside—that black thing?”

Mycroft rolled up his sleeve and showed me his left wrist, and there it was: a black metal cylinder, about 15 centimeters long, strapped to his arm.

“A telescoping baton,” he explained, removing the object from its holster.  I stepped back, and he flicked his hand and the rod was suddenly half a meter long.  “As I prefer not to carry firearms in my own home.”

“Of course not,” I said, perturbed.  His tone was bizarrely matter-of-fact, as though there was nothing strange at all about carrying _any_ law enforcement weapons on his person, while jogging on a treadmill, on a sunny Sunday morning.

I hesitated before asking this, but I had to know: “Is Art really in so much danger, even here?”

Mycroft folded his sleeve back over the baton as we stepped into the foyer.  The gray-haired woman had already let Sherlock and John inside; Art was beside her, holding Julie.  Then Mycroft turned his back to the door so Sherlock couldn’t read his lips when he said to me, “Until Moriarty’s dead, you’re not safe.  Anywhere.”

“Good morning Mycroft,” John said, when we turned to face them, “and Béatrice.  You’re looking well—Mary will be happy to hear it.”

“And how is she?  And the baby?” I asked.  “I’m sorry I haven’t called recently.  It’s just been…”  It was an awkward topic, since Sherlock no doubt knew what was going on and if he knew, of course he would tell John.  “It’s been a little hectic recently." 

“We don’t doubt it,” Sherlock interrupted.  “Though, the little Holmeses don’t appear the worse for wear.  _Your_ daughter’s not nearly as fat as this one, is she John?” Sherlock asked.  “No matter.  And Arthur, how grown up you look.”  Sherlock straightened and addressed himself to Mycroft.  “Don’t feel bad that he takes after me—I always was the handsome one.  Is that why you’ve been exercising so vigorously in the last months, brother dear?  Or perhaps you’re just concerned for your longevity, considering how many children you seem to be acquiring in such a short span of time.”

“Sherlock,” John said, looking at me apologetically.  “We have news, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Yes!  You are absolutely right, John.  We have something fantastic.”  Sherlock clapped his hands together once for emphasis.  “Moriarty's dead.”

Art looked up from the baby, eyes wide.  His expression, I’m sure, mirrored my own.

“Mrs. Henry, take the children upstairs,” Mycroft said without taking his eyes from his brother.  “Arthur, practice your Latin." 

Then I was too stunned to hear the rest of the brief, brisk conversation until Mycroft and John were already out the door—it had only been a moment, anyway, doubtless they’d explain everything elsewhere.  Sherlock lingered behind a moment. 

“Béatrice,” he said.  “It’s a shame you’re leaving, but really the timing couldn’t be better.  You and Arthur should get out of the house today, spend the afternoon together before you head off to... Kansas, is it?  Or Nebraska?”

I looked up at him, puzzled.  “Topeka,” I said.  “Washburn University.  But how…?  You know what, I don’t care how you did it.”  Moriarty was gone, or at least contained, and I could spend a nice day with my son.  I had better things to do than listen to Sherlock Holmes explain his deductive process.  “Congratulations on Moriarty, really.  Art will want to hear all about it, but you’d better get going before Mycroft hits you with that telescoping baton.”

“He must be feeling youthful, my brother,” Sherlock said, though his eyes were on the stairs Art and Mrs. Henry (apparently that was her name) had just ascended.  “He was an excellent field agent, back in the day.”

Strange again.  That wasn’t something I had ever considered, though I supposed it made sense.  He couldn’t have sat behind desks and threatened people his _entire_ career.

“Well then, Dr. Marchand, I must be off,” Sherlock said, buttoning up his long coat.  “But since you haven’t been out of the house in some time and might not know where to go with Arthur today… I would suggest the London Zoo.  Mycroft used to take me there when I was a boy.  He made me count the birds in the aviary.”  He had the strangest expression on his face.

“He was always so cross when I got it wrong.”  Sherlock looked at me, very serious all of a sudden.  “I don’t get it wrong anymore.”

“All right, I’ll remember that,” I said, to humor him.  I never understood what Sherlock was talking about. 

* * * 

Art had forgotten his ice cream in the challenge of estimating London’s captive butterfly population; melted mint chocolate chip was making a trail down his wrist.

“Oh, Art,” I said, reaching for his hand and pulling my pack of sanitizing wipes out of my purse.  As soon as Art started toddling around, I learned never to go anywhere without napkins and baby wipes and bleach pens.  The grass stains he used to get at school—playing kickball, he said, planting bulbs in the class garden.

A man sat down beside me on the bench and knocked into my shoulder.  I gripped Art’s hand so tightly he dropped his ice cream cone.

“Mum,” Art muttered, annoyed.

“Sorry sweetheart,” I said.  “I’ll replace it.”  I’d been in a perpetually anxious state for a year now, and I hadn’t been out in public for so long—I was too tightly wound.  Any stranger, any person I didn’t know, made me tense up.  _But that’s over now,_ I thought.  _There’s no danger to us anymore._ I found a pound note in my purse, but everything was always so exorbitantly expensive at parks and museums and zoos that I kept digging to see if I had any loose change.

“Allow me,” said the man on the other end of the bench.  “It’s my fault—I startled you.”  He tried to hand me another pound.

“Oh please don’t worry,” I said, attempting to wave him off.  “It’s nothing, really.”

“ _Mum_ ,” Art said.

“Just a minute, I said.”

“Let me pay, Mrs. Martin.”

“What?”

I looked the stranger in the face for the first time—he was pale, maybe even sallow, and he was wearing sunglasses with a dark blue suit that seemed out of place for a day at the zoo.  Then he smiled and I felt Art reach for my hand again.

“Mum,” he said.  “It’s the man from the television.”

And Art was right, of course.  The stranger took off his sunglasses and his dark eyes glittered.  They were black and glittered, like a bird, or a rat.

“Mrs. Martin, you have _no idea_ what an absolute pleasure it is to meet you and your son at last.”  He held out his hand, like he actually expected me to shake it.  Instead, my left hand was holding Art’s in a death grip and with my right I reached slowly for my phone.

“ _Tsk tsk tsk,_ Mrs. Martin,” Moriarty said, tossing my phone high into the air and grinning as it cracked on the pavement.  “And don’t think of running because you’ll be dead before you can stand.  Or scream.”  He pulled back his suit jacket—like cops and villains do in the movies—to show me that he had a handgun tucked into the top of his pants.  In my fear my mind was moving in strange directions.  My eyes drifted from the gun to my phone on the ground.  He must have lifted it when he bumped into me on the bench.  _I was always so careful of that in New York_.  _Everyone from home told me I’d get robbed on the subway._

“Well aren’t you going to introduce me to your little boy?” Moriarty asked, looking affronted.  “That’s not very polite, Mrs. Martin.  Or do you prefer Dr. Marchand?  Mrs. Holmes, maybe?”  His frown changed almost instantly into a wide grin.  “You know, now that we’re meeting in person I am glad he didn’t die the first time after all.  Photographs just don’t do the resemblance justice!”

 _What do you want?_   That’s what you’re supposed to ask in a situation like that, isn’t it?  But I wasn’t thinking normally, like I said, and instead I asked Art whether he’d finished counting.

“I lost track,” he said, confused.

“Well then you should start over,” I ordered.  “I don’t want you to say another word unless it’s a number, and it had better be right.  You’re father will be cross if it’s not right.  And Uncle Mycroft.  He’ll be cross too.”

Art was bewildered; he didn’t understand yet.  How strange, I thought, to grasp something before a Holmes.

“Do what I tell you, Arthur!” I said, and with the greatest effort he turned away from Moriarty’s hungry rictus, but I knew he was listening to everything.

“My, my.”  Moriarty jumped up onto the bench and perched himself on the back, his feet tapping on the seat.  He inched closer to me and leaned down to whisper in my ear.  His breath smelled like mint.  “Poor Arthur.  Sherlock must be a very severe father indeed to have him so frightened.”

“What do you want?” I asked at last.  “Are you going to kill us?”

“Hmm…”  Moriarty pursed his lips and rocked his head back and forth.  “Such a difficult question!  You know I told him once that I would ‘burn his heart out,’ but now, looking at the two of you here, I’m really not sure.”  He spoke as though he was confiding a secret, until he sang out: “I—am—just—not—sure!”

Moriarty’s voice was high-pitched, almost feminine, and he really, actually sang the last sentence.  This, then, was the man who was going to kill us: a genuine madman.  And he was, of course, going to kill us.  He’d almost done it once before and I knew—I knew the moment I saw the way he looked at Art, so visibly like his uncle—that the only reason he hadn’t killed us yet, in the middle of the London Zoological Society’s Butterfly Paradise, was that he thought Art was Sherlock Holmes’s son.

Moriarty was obsessed with Sherlock, Mycroft had told me.  He would kill him eventually—maybe, eventually—but his obsession was such that he couldn’t bring himself to do it _yet._   The world would be so boring without Sherlock.  So instead, he’d make him suffer.  _By targeting my brother’s friends and family,_ Mycroft had said.  And that was the case, yes, and Mycroft had never _actually_ lied, no, but he hadn’t told me the whole truth either.

Moriarty didn’t care about Sherlock’s nephew; he cared about his “son.”

No doubt if Moriarty knew the truth he would just shoot the two of us with a disappointed sigh and be done with it.  As it was, he would toy with us for a little while, until he grew bored again.  I knew we were going to die; I didn’t need to be a detective to deduce that it was the most likely outcome.  Sherlock had obviously planned to lure Moriarty out by convincing me to take Art somewhere public—and I, like an idiot, had played my part perfectly—but I couldn’t imagine that he’d intended to let Moriarty get so close.  The man was literally breathing down my neck.  Something must have gone wrong.  Sherlock’s plan—so reckless, so cruel, so destitute of all human compassion or feeling—had gone wrong and we were going to die.  It was no consolation that Sherlock would doubtless follow us to the grave shortly, when Mycroft murdered him.

I know people would expect me to say, _And that’s when my maternal instinct kicked in, and with a preternatural strength I hadn’t known I possessed I pushed him from the bench, wrestled the gun away from him, and kept him pinned there on the grass until the police arrived._ Or maybe I shot him.  Maybe I killed him right then, like any of the caged animals around us would do, were their cubs threatened.

But that’s not what happened.  I felt no rush of adrenaline, or hormones.  My blood didn’t pound in my ears; I didn’t see red.  I just sat there, and watched Moriarty, and accepted the fact that there was nothing I could do that would make any difference to the situation.  The only thing I could try would be to buy time.  Stall the inevitable.  Hope that Sherlock’s plan wasn’t dead—just delayed.

“You were flat,” I said.  “When you sang just now.  If you were trying to do a pentatonic scale, you were very flat on the last note.  Listen.”  I sang a correct ascending scale to the words _I Am Just Not Sure._   “Hear the difference?”

Moriarty jumped from the bench and stood in front of me.  He placed his arms on either side of me on the back of the bench and leaned forward so our noses were almost touching.

“What’s that?”

I felt Art begin to shake a little, beside me.  Moriarty looked at Art.

“Do _you_ think I was flat?” he asked, as though he couldn’t comprehend the idea. 

We were still holding hands, Art and I.  We didn’t dare move any closer, but I felt his hand trembling.

“Don’t be afraid, Art,” I said.  “He’s not going to hurt us.  You can answer.”  _We have to keep talking_ , I thought.  _For as long as we can._   I willed Art to understand.  He was seven years old, for God’s sake.  I couldn’t expect him to understand, but I hoped.

“I don’t know if you were flat, sir.”  Art’s voice was strained.  “But… my mum’s an opera singer.  She sang at the Met when… we were in America.  I guess she would know better than me.”  He was about to cry.  “Sir.”

“Oh I know,” Moriarty said.  He stood back and looked at us together, mother and son.  “I was going to say we should take a nice family picture but you, little Arthur Holmes, are making me think differently.”

Moriarty reached into his jacket and pulled out:

A cell phone.

Not a gun.

His cell phone.

“Video is _so_ much more engaging,” he said brightly.  “We’ll send your father a video.  Come on now, Arthur, stand up.  Good.  Now hop up onto that bench.  Excellent!  All right, now I want the two of you to sing something for my dear friend Sherlock.  You can sing, can’t you Arthur?  Now now, don’t be shy.  Nod your head for yes, go on.  Yes!  _Bravissimo!_ What to perform, then?”  He held up his phone and pointed it at our grim faces.  “You must know _Con te partiró._   Time to Say Goodbye, that’s what they released it as in English, isn’t it?  Come on now, Béatrice, you be Sarah Brightman, and Arthur can play Bocelli.  Time to Say Goodbye—isn’t that perfect?”

“Yes,” I said, squeezing Art’s hand.  He’d grown so tall over the last year, and his baby weight had fallen all away.  He wasn’t a little boy anymore.  His hands weren’t pudgy.

And then I sang.

_Quando sono sola_

_sogno all’orrizzonte_

_e mancan le parole,_

_si lo so che non c’é luce…_

I didn’t hold back.  A crowd had started to gather, and even though I knew they thought Moriarty must have been just an ordinary parent taking a video of his wife and son, I thought, at least, maybe it would be harder for Moriarty to get away once he shot us.  As I sang I stepped in front of Art, slowly, slowly—Moriarty would have to shoot me first, and maybe some hero in the crowd would tackle him after the first shot and Art would be okay.  Maybe.

 _When I'm alone_  
I dream of the horizon  
and words fail;  
yes, I know there is no light...

There was no light.  That seemed obvious by now.  Sherlock Holmes wasn't coming to save us; he'd put us there.  There was no light, of course not, but I kept singing anyway.  I don't know, maybe I thought that if there _were_ hope, if Sherlock  _did_ have a plan, if we could be so lucky... maybe this would make it easier to find us.


End file.
